I am reading; Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks’ by John Curran. He deciphered Agatha’s handwriting, laying out the notes that she jotted down throughout 73 notebooks. What piqued my interest was how she got her ideas with the use of nursery rhymes. Such as:
• One, Two Buckle My Shoe` November 4, 1940. Five little pigs, January 11, 1943
• Four and Twenty Blackbirds, March 1941
- Hickory Dickory Dock, October 31, 1955
- ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?‘ August 1935
On page 129: “We are shown how some of the ‘references to nursery rhymes scattered throughout the Notebooks, sometimes the idea went no further than brief jottings and in a number of cased it would seem that the rhyme defeated even Christie’s fertile imagination.”
Agatha Christie’s note: “…..Ding Dong Dell-Pussy’s in the Well-? An old maid murdered”
Agatha Christie was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, England and died at Eighty-five on January 12, 1976 .
According to the Guinness World Records: “Agatha Christie (UK) is the most translated author with 7,236 translations.”
Every author’s muse appears in different ways. Every reader will absorb the information from this book differently, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks’ by John Curran. What you won’t find is a perfect plot to follow as a template. (That is for you to create.) You will see her thought process as she created her stories.
What I took away, was how she used nursery rhymes. And how those nursery rhymes – she worked itself into an idea, a mystery, a murder. Then she mind-mapped, and brainstormed phrases, scribbled into Notebooks, then, let them create an image in her mind, from there, those images grew into her stories.
After reading this book, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks’ by John Curran. I need to pick an Agatha Christie book off my shelf and read it again, this time picking out the details of how she created it. Check out how she built her characters with description and setting. Check out her sentence structure and her use of dialogue.
