Pen to Paper

In This Essay

The Mystery of the Messy Notebooks: Why Agatha Christie’s method was utterly deranged by Christine Kenneally, Slate, April 12, 2010.

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making by John Curran

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Letters on Life: New Prose Translations by Rainer Maria Rilke (Ulrich Baer, ed. and trans.)

On Monday, I was reading Slate. What inspired me to read it that day, I am not sure: it has not been one of the sources that I regularly turn to for my news.

Perhaps because I want to be a writer myself, I have always found it fascinating to listen to stories about how artists, musicians, and authors create their work. Without any real study, the descriptions of the creative process stick with me.

For example, years ago I listened to part of an interview with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. (Perhaps the entire band was being interviewed, my memory is vague.) I remember nothing about that interview, save this one thing: R.E.M. records the music without Michael Stipe present and then they give him the rough cut on a tape. He walks around listening to the tape again and again until he is able to put words to the music.

But I am glad that I decided to read Slate this week. Otherwise I would have missed a great article about the writing process that Agatha Christie employed. If you can call how Agatha Christie wrote a “process.”

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Weekly Review: September 25th to October 1st

Today I’m launching a weekly link review, in which I’ll publish newspaper, magazine, and radio stories related to literature, education, psychology and neuroscience. Bear with me as I get the style down and while work out a few bugs, like how to link items in the table of contents to the full page so that you can jump right to any title that catches your fancy.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Barring Books in Harvard
• Bright Star, Movie Review and Trailer
• Becoming Teachers
• The Craft of Writing and Inspiration of Mentors
• Metaphors and the Way We Think
• Does Education Protect Someone from Dementia and Alzheimer’s?
• Taking Things Serially

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