From, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography
1. “I myself was always recognized, though quite kindly, as ‘the slow one’ of the family. The reactions of my mother and my sister were unusually quick- I could never keep up. I was, too, very inarticulate. It was always difficult for me to assemble into words what I wanted to say……It is probably one of the causes that have made me a writer.”
2. “There always has to be a lapse of time after the accomplishment of a piece of creative work before you can in any way evaluate it.”
3. “You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence. If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there has to be one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder if it may not be all right after all.”
4. to a friend who wished to be in one of her novels, “I don’t think I could put you in. I can’t do anything with real people. I have to imagine them.”
5. “It is awfully hard for an author to put things in words when you have to do it in the course of conversation. You can do it with a pencil in your hand, or sitting in front of your typewriter- then the thing comes out already formed as it should come out- but you can’t describe things that you are only going to write; or at least I can’t. I learned in the end never to say anything about a book before it was written. Criticism after you have written it is helpful. You can argue the point, or you can give in, but at least you know how it has struck one reader. Your own description of what you are going to write, however, sounds so futile, that to be told kindly that it won’t do meets with your instant agreement.”
6. “Your criticism is bound to be that you yourself would have written it in such and such a way, but that does not mean that it would be right for another author. We all have our own ways of expressing ourselves.”
7. ” An early story of mine was shown to a well-known authoress by a kindly friend. She reported on it sadly but adversely, saying that the author would never make a writer. What she really meant, though she did not know it herself at the time because she was an author and not a critic, was that the person who was writing was still an immature and inadequate writer who could not yet produce anything worth publishing. A critic or an editor might have been more perceptive, because it is their profession to notice the germs of what may be. So I don’t like criticizing and I think it can easily do harm.”
8. “The only thing I will advance as criticism is the fact that the would-be-writer has not taken any account of the market for his wares. It is no good writing a novel of thirty thousand words- that is not a length which is easily publishable at present….You have got something you feel you can do well and that you enjoy doing well, and you want to sell it well. If so, you must give it the dimensions and the appearance that is wanted….It is no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius- some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman- a tradesman is a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas; but you must submit to the discipline of form.”
9. “The disadvantage of the dictaphone is that it encourages you to be much too verbose. There is no doubt that the effort involved in typing or writing does help me in keeping to the point. ”
10. “There is a right length for everything. I think myself that the right length for a detective story is fifty- thousand words. I know this is considered by some publishers as too short. Possibly readers feel themselves cheated if they pay their money and only get fifty-thousand words- so sixty- thousand or seventy-thousand are more acceptable. If your book runs to more than that I think you usually find that it would have been better if it had been shorter.”
11. “When you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style. Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly. But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You will admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Sparks, or Grahame Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learned that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.”
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