evidence: She sounds like a someone writing into the unknown, but as John Curran illustrates in his book The Secret Notebooks of Agatha Christie, Christie worked over her ideas, if in a scattershot sort of way. She kept notebooks dispersed across multiple households and used them over the course of years, jotting ideas, trying out options until the pieces dovetailed and showed the way forward. Her system worked for her, though there was anxiety built into the beginning, every time. "There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book," Christie wrote in her autobiography. "There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off." [...] All this to say that Agatha Christie was a writer for whom the process of writing was almost entirely internal. When she gives Ariadne Oliver three minutes to complain, she comes as close to telling us how it’s done as she ever did: Stop talking about writing and write.