Writing as a Flawed Human
Writing as a Flawed Human
What I've learned from Agatha Christie... so far.
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is a bit of a cross-genre essay around writing and spirituality.
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“Nobody in the world is more inadequate to act the heroine than I.” — Agatha Christie
Perhaps you, dear reader are spending your life pretending to be “average” when you are actually breaking boundaries and shattering misconceptions like my beloved Writing Spirit Guide.
Perhaps you, like Agatha Christie, have decided that: “the reason I began to write... was in order to avoid having to talk to people.”
Or maybe, like Agatha, you have stories in your head that demand to be put down on the page in order to deal with real life.
To find a commonality with a writer like Agatha Christie is not surprising — especially since she has been dead for nearly fifty years and is STILL the number one best-selling author in the entire world. There’s a reason so many of us love her.
But behind Agatha’s writerly life, there’s an entire person with flaws, trauma, and wounds that drove her stories.
We forget that Agatha is more than just a best-selling author and a persona — she was human and dealt with human related issues.
And it’s one of the biggest reasons I turn to her as my writing spirit guide.
Going Deeper with Agatha
Writing Fiction to Heal
One of my greatest discoveries about Agatha Christie was that she truly believed in writing fiction to heal. She didn’t use those words, and she never came out and talked directly about it — but it’s incredibly clear once you know the scope of her life and what she wrote — she used fiction as a vehicle to deal with what was happening in her life. And not only in theory (writing in general is therapeutic) but in practice, by embedding her real-life traumas and emotions into her stories.
Not only was this transgressive in the era of which Agatha was writing, but it was groundbreaking for a female writer to talk about real-life issues such as marriage, divorce, and the freedom to be a full person as a woman. For example:
Two plays Agatha wrote in this period, Ten Years and The Lie, show women dissatisfied with marriages that had begun as companionate before tilting off balance. Ten Years is about a married couple who agree to rethink their relationship after a decade together, a milestone Agatha and Archie reached in 1924. Onstage, the wife longs for more. ‘We women were slaves once and self sacrifice was expected of us as a matter of course,’ she says, ‘but now we’re free to live our own lives… I’m still young… I want romance – passion – fire – the things we had once… I want to live – to live my life – not yours.’ The Lie deals with the same issue: a marriage in which the flame has died. Agatha would write a lot about her marriage and its troubles, in fiction and in her autobiography.” [1]
This realization about Agatha was deeply important in my relationship with her. Every single piece of fiction I write is in some way an attempt to heal something. I’ve talked ad nauseam about writing fiction to heal (the method I created), but having a writing spirit guide who literally did this through her entire career adds a nuanced level of understanding between us.
When I talk to her about extremely personal and painful things that I want to write through to heal — I know that she is responding or supporting me knowing what a important aspect this is in my writing. To be honest, there are writers and coaches in my real life who have tried to steer me away from the method of writing fiction to heal or to not put so much of me into them, but they also don’t have the deeply nuanced understanding that this ability to transform pain into fiction is the key to being the writer I am. It’s also so much the source of our creativity as Lucy Worsley writes in her biography of Agatha:
And looking back at the pattern of her life, difficult times personally were times of creativity for Agatha Christie the artist. She invented Poirot during the intensity of the First World War, produced Roger Ackroyd in the dog days of her marriage, invented Miss Marple in the aftermath of her mental illness. [2]
Strengths & Weaknesses
My editors, beta-readers, book coaches are forever giving me the feedback around setting and description. Meaning, I need to do more. Be better.
Until I started working with Agatha, I would internalize this feedback as being a bad writer. I would revise and rewrite and start from scratch to try and appeal to their feedback (and tbh, I still do!). But when I read Agatha’s thoughts on this, I immediately felt a weight lifted off my shoulders.
“I don't like describing people or places, she once admitted, 'I just want to get on with the dialogue.” [3]
“Plays suited her because ‘you are not hampered with all that description which clogs you so terribly in a book and stops you getting on with what’s happening.’” [4]
After realizing that I decided to talk to her about the piece I was getting ready to submit for my Dublin Writing Workshop application. That conversation led me to feel better about making changes to the piece around dialogue.
Flash forward to my 1-1 session with my instructor and imagine both my surprise and delight when he said, “You know, your dialogue is fantastic. So good that you should be in working in Hollywood writing screenplays. But your setting and sensory details are lacking a bit…”
I don’t discount his opinion or suggestions because I do know that writing sensory descriptions is a weakness. But instead of internalizing that feedback as being a bad writer, I realized with Agatha’s help that while there is room for improvement in this area, I should also realize that leaning into our strengths can sometimes offset the areas we aren’t strong in.
Writing the Darkness
Another commonality that I share with Agatha, and often feel a kinship with her around is our propensity to write dark. By that, we both find interest in the darkest parts of humanity (I’ve written about this a lot, here is a more in-depth essay on it).
More importantly, I realized that she understood the terror that can take place inside of a home and horror and darkness can emanate from even the most leave-it-to-beaver kind of families.
From now on, Christie novels would firmly address dark, uncomfortable feelings. They address the darkness that can lurk within even normal, respectable people. [5]
Those of us who write dark often have experience with the dark and through Agatha’s publishing trajectory, I can see very clearly how she assimilated those dark experiences into her writing. And I’m sure, as it goes for most writers, the more she wrote and explored the dark corners of her mind and her fiction, the deeper she went until the darkness remained a companion. Agatha is said to have been:
“A writer dealing in family secrets, reworking the conventional forms of Victorian transgression – the inheritance drama, mistaken identities, hidden madness.’” [6]
I find Agatha’s ability to dip into the darkness and be successful at it quite inspiring. For a writer (like me) who has been constantly chastised for writing “too dark” or writing about things that are “too heavy,” finding camaraderie in Agatha was a balm to my soul.
In fact, recently, I had a conversation with her about my latest W-I-P which is very, very dark. I asked her if she thought the premise and content I’d worked on had gone too far. Her response…
The guidebook for this card says:
Message from the Gadfly of the Soul: I've been swatted at more times than I can recall because I bring messages people don't want to hear. I whisper inconvenient insights. I talk about the elephant in the room.
Believe me, there is no malice involved. I was sent by Divine Creativity to stir up ideas. Especially the ones that shatter old patterns and rewrite paradigms. I buzz around and alight where I sense someone willing to listen. Ive come to you because I know you have the inner strength to handle the hard truths. Sometimes my messages might feel overwhelming. You wonder what you could possibly do with them. They feel too burdensome to carry, let alone write about. It's because I love you. I don't want you to be blinded by what's easy or comfortable. You are braver than you remember.
Throughout the ages I have buzzed in the ears of changemakers and light leaders. I bugged Socrates for his whole life, and as a result, he bugged all of Athens. Thousands of years later, your wisest thinkers still ponder the questions I whispered in ancient ears. Now I'm bugging you. You are the perfect messenger for change. Don't worry you're not responsible for reshaping the whole world. Just keep reshaping your own inner world and watch the ripples carry out to infinity.
You may read that and think — well that’s not really an answer. But it was. For me, it was Agatha telling me that writing the darkness is not merely a preference… it was something I was born to do. I no longer worried about if what I was writing was dark, instead I leaned into it.
Writing as a Flawed Human
It does not go unnoticed that Agatha Christie, a product of her time, had many problematic views. But you know what? So did my grandparents. And while I’ve always lived by the “benefit of the doubt” rule, it’s impossible to imagine every literary role model lives up to our expectations in writing and in life. Agatha is no different.
Another way Agatha caused offence was through continuing to fail to see what was wrong with anti-Semitism. Stereotypes in general were so integral to Agatha’s work that she couldn’t stop using them, even when she should have. [7]
Agatha had biases and racially discriminated and caused offense in her writing and personal life. Do I wish this wasn’t the case? Of course. Do I have different views than Agatha? Absolutely. But do I think she’s a terrible human being? No. I think she was a complex and flawed person, as the rest of us are.
Perhaps I am more forgiving of Agatha given that we’ve had contentious conversations about this exact thing and what I’ve come to learn about her (and other dead people) is that things look very different on the other side. The biases and discrimination and ignorant choices we make as humans feels so incredibly wrong when you can see the whole of the world. I believe (regardless of if any one else does) that Agatha now knows that some of her views about people, place and the world were wrong. But there’s not a whole lot she can do about it now.
I bring this up not because I condone her views or because I want to justify it — I bring it up because all of us, living or dead, have made mistakes. We are all flawed in some way but writer’s have the fortunate and unfortunate ability to leave behind the legacy of those flaws.
Agatha’s situation reminds me that I will not always get it right. That I come to the page with my own biases and while they may be wrong (probably are, in fact), I am human. But I have an advantage that Agatha did not — so many more tools at my disposal to reflect, evaluate and change.
Writing with Perseverance
Agatha Christie wrote approximately 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, and over 20 plays throughout her career (not including the novels she wrote under her pen name). You do not achieve that level of prolific-ness without having a healthy dose of perseverance, especially in the era that Agatha wrote in. Another facet of Agatha’s personality that I admire and believe I possess as well is the motivation to do the thing we’re told we cannot do.
‘I don’t think you could do it,’ said Madge. ‘They are very difficult to do. I’ve thought about it.’
‘I should like to try.’
‘Well, I bet you couldn’t,’ said Madge.
There the matter rested… but the words had been said… the idea had been planted: some day I would write a detective story. [8]
But it’s not just perseverance in the face of doubters that made Agatha such a formidable force… it was that she persevered even when her personal life was in shambles. Her opium-addicted brother stayed with her as she tried to get him clean, but ultimately he succumbed to his addiction. However, that didn’t stop Agatha from writing… in fact, it seemed to her push her harder.
While Monty was suffering, Agatha was working. In the summer of 1926 came her greatest achievement yet. Her sixth published novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is not only one of her very best books – it’s one of the greatest detective novels of all time. [9]
If you’re not aware, in 1926, Agatha Christie went “missing” for 11 days. Where she went, what she did, and what happened during those 11 days are hotly debated. And the discourse around it has been a source of controversy even today. What is known though is that whatever drove Agatha to the point of disappearance and her subsequent reappearance is that she was in a state of despair. Though she didn’t touch on those days in 1926 in her autobiography (nor has she talked to me about it) she does give us some insight into her emotional state of mind at the time and what it took to get her back to writing fiction:
Agatha’s autobiography implies that what brought her back from the brink was the remembered voice of a woman. A teacher had once told her the essence of Christianity was the defeat of despair. ‘Those few words,’ Agatha wrote, ‘remained with me […] they were to come back to me and give me hope at a time when despair had me in its grip.’ [10]
What I love about this is that Agatha is often the “remembered” voice in my head, telling me to fight the despair, the fear, and the inner critic when it shows up on my shoulder.
Sometimes, I think perseverance is just as much about facing a new day as it is continuing to work through a difficult writing project. And often, Agatha reminds me that I don’t really have to look that far to find my own perseverance. I simply need to show up and face another day.
To Agatha, With Love
One reason I wanted to write this essay was to showcase what it means to have a deeper relationship with a writing spirit guide. As my chapter in The Wild Woman’s Book of Alchemy is released into the wider world today, (happy book birthday to all contributors!) I wanted to give readers the “and then…” look at what it means to actually be in communication and understanding with the guide that is supporting you.
I knew nothing substantial about Agatha before she showed up as my guide, but through my own intentional research and study of her and her work, I can see why she showed up for me. I can see why our bond has strengthened over the years. There is a great deal of respect that comes from having a connection like this and I guess at the end of the day, I want writers to know that you can find a guide and it can be a fruitful, frustrating, beautiful and fulfilling relationship.
The key? You have to be willing to believe.
If you’re interested in purchasing a digital copy, it’s available TODAY for .99! And 100% of the book’s online sales will be donated to The Wolf Conservation Center in Salem, NY.
[1] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (pp. 110-111). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[2] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 253). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[3] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 102). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[4] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 292). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[5] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 121). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[6] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 354). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[7] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (pp. 283-284). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[8] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 68). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[9] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (p. 114). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.
[10] Worsley, Lucy. Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (pp. 130-131). Pegasus Books. Kindle Edition.