Ian Fleming's unique writing approach created a billion-dollar franchise, an immortal character, and the world's greatest spy stories
Ian Fleming, the now-legendary author of the original James Bond series, once described the origin of his writing career:
"My daily occupation in Jamaica is spearfishing and underwater exploring... But after five years of it I didn’t want to kill any more fish except barracudas and the rare monster fish and I knew my own underwater terrain like the back of my hand. Above all, after being a bachelor for 44 years, I was on the edge of marrying and the prospect was so horrifying that I was in urgent need of some activity to take my mind off it... So I decided to write a book."
That book, of course, was Casino Royale, the first in a series featuring James Bond, an English secret agent with a license to kill. The character leapt from Fleming's imagination to the pages of his golden typewriter, scaled to the top of the best-seller list, then vaulted onto the silver screen. The rest, as they say, is history. James Bond is firmly embedded into Western culture, and no matter who portrays him or how he morphs to fit contemporary zeitgeist, he remains one of history's most recognizable characters.
So how did Fleming do it?
Splinters: A Personal Note
Ian Fleming almost got me fired.
Years ago, I worked in a machine shop as a CNC Operator. It was monotonous. I was terrible at it. Every day I left the shop covered rancid cutting fluid, plucking metal splinters from my fingers.
Still, I remember that time fondly. I made it through those never-ending shifts by listening to the James Bond audiobooks — every one of them.
In contrast to the noisy, gray machines and the omnipresent smell of grease and oil, Fleming's books immersed me in a exciting, exotic landscape. A world of black and white concepts - good and evil, chaos and order, love and war - illustrated in vibrant mid-century technicolor. It was like teleporting into some extraordinary, action-packed version of life, complete with a suave, English narrator.
The stories engrossed me, but did no favors for my success as a machinist. Daydreaming, I would forget to swap a finished part out from a dormant lathe or milling machine until the supervisors rushed over and snapped me back to reality. Worse, once or twice I absentmindedly put a piece of raw material in backward, and had to smash the EMERGENCY STOP button like 007 terminating the launch of a nuclear arsenal.
In the process I became fascinated by Fleming's writing — the pace and tempo, the fantastical storylines and bizarre characters, the vivid imagery and descriptions. Why were his stories rife with brand names? How did he write such intense, suspenseful action scenes? Who in their right mind names a character Pussy Galore?
Learning his secret recipe became an obsession. I scoured articles, interviews, letters, and of course, the novels, digging out the formulas and techniques that helped Fleming turn his otherwise run-of-the-mill spy stories into some of the most successful thrillers of all time.
Now I'd like to share those secrets with you. Here is everything I learned — 13 powerful writing lessons from Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond:
1.) "You must know thrilling things before you can write about them"
How exactly do you create one of the most enduring, influential thriller series of all time? It starts, Fleming argues, with living a thrilling life.
As author Raymond Benson explains in The James Bond Bedside Companion, Fleming's "rather brave attitude, mixed with [his] undeniably boyish taste for the romantic, fed lifeblood into the Bond adventures, and for the most part, explains why they are so popular."
Ian Fleming's resume is laden with adventure and intrigue. Like his most famous character, Fleming was a naval intelligence officer in WWII. He was in charge of Operation Goldeneye, formed and directed not one, but two units of commandos, broke into the Japanese Consul General's office to steal a code book, helped build out the first major American intelligence agency... the list goes on.
After the war, Fleming became Foreign Manager at Kemsley Newspapers, traveling far and wide to pursue stories for The Sunday Times. He was a globetrotter, adventurer, and aficionado with a breadth of passions: spear fishing, treasure hunting, golf, gambling, skiing, mountain climbing, driving fast cars, collecting first edition books, and of course, drinking martinis.
It was Fleming's enthusiastic generalism - his wide-ranging interests and skill sets coupled with an unbounded curiosity - that allowed him to write such thrilling yet believable adventures. His love of gambling translated into the high-stakes baccarat game in Casino Royale. His skiing obsession informed the famous ski chase in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. The harrowing scuba scene in Live and Let Die is a nightmare version of Fleming's own underwater forays exploring Jamaica's reefs and marine life.
In Thrilling Cities, a collection of his best nonfiction travel stories, Fleming introspects on his own sense of curiosity and adventure:
"All my life I have been interested in adventure and, abroad, I have enjoyed the frisson of leaving the wide, well-lit streets and venturing up back alleys in search of the hidden, authentic pulse of towns. It was perhaps this habit that turned me into a writer of thrillers and, by the time I made the two journeys that produced these essays, I had certainly got into the way of looking at people and places and things through a thriller-writer’s eye."
According to Fleming, most of the central incidents in his books are based on real events, either in his own life or from research and second-hand stories. This level of veracity helped flesh out the Bond character and novels. As the author explains in the aptly titled essay "How to Write a Thriller:"
"You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction."
Fleming isn't the only fiction author to pilfer from history books. George R. R. Martin, for example, is well-known for borrowing real historical events for the famous plotlines in A Song of Ice and Fire, a.k.a. Game of Thrones. (For example, remember the infamous "Red Wedding" scene? It's pulled from Scottish history. Even the map of Westeros, Martin's fictional world, is just Britain and Ireland turned upside down.)
To capture this important inspiration and source material, no matter where his adventures led him, Fleming was rarely found without a notebook.
2.) Take notes
Fleming's fiction danced elegantly in the margin between fact and fantasy. The writer supplemented his first-hand experience with diligent research and constantly hunted for novel information to embed in the Bond stories. Ernest Cuneo, one of Fleming's close friends, described the writer's frustratingly intense curiosity:
"Detail fascinated him... If he ran across a trick of the trade, a nuance, a fillip, he would pursue it like a ferret, for example, how cowboys on the range made a barbecue sauce with sugar, ketchup and Worcestershire sauce... all of these things he’d scribble down with the avidity of an explorer taking notes on the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb... He said that at the end of each day, he had compiled notes. These he amplified and typed out, no matter what the hour, at the rate of about 800 [words] a day. 'Figure it out for yourself,' he said. 'At the end of a year, I have about 250 or 300 of these daily memos, and when I go down to Jamaica, I weave them into a book.'"
Fleming leveraged real events, secondhand stories, and personal experiences, amplified them with his self-described "vivid powers of imagination," and then saturated them with factually-accurate, insider's details. It created a unique writing style and provided the 007 novels with an impressive level of depth, realism, and intrigue.
Then, with a head full of ideas and inspiration, Fleming landed on the beaches of Jamaica and took the first draft by storm.
3.) Bulldoze through the first draft
According to Ian Fleming, your goal for a first draft is simply to finish. Don't analyze, revise as you go, or wonder what so-and-so will think — just hammer on until you're done.
"If you once look back, you are lost... If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain... I don't even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished."
For Fleming, your first draft is meant to capture ideas and tone, not perfect prose. On writing Casino Royale, the author reflected:
"I rewrote nothing and made no corrections until my book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired at the mistakes in grammar and style, the repetitions and the crudities. And I obstinately closed my mind to self-mockery and “what will my friends say?” I savagely hammered on until the proud day when the last page was done."
Author Chuck Wendig recommends a similar approach, describing a first draft as "the beach-storming draft." Like Fleming, his advice is simply to survive the first draft at all costs. Make it to the figurative beach-head no matter how messy, chaotic, and painful the process. If something is worth fixing, you can do so after the action of draft number one.
4.) Revise ruthlessly and develop thick skin
After he stormed through the first draft, Fleming combed through his manuscripts twice, copy-editing and diligently rewriting select passages before sending them to publishers.
The Man with the Golden Typewriter is an entertaining compilation of Fleming's Bond-related letters, including extensive correspondence with publishers. The editors provided feedback, corrected grammar, challenged him to avoid cliches and be more creative in his phrasing, encouraged him to avoid the passive voice and "therewasery," and more. He readily adopted many suggestions and his writing improved for it.
However, he confidently discarded or refuted disagreeable recommendations. For example, when one editor suggested they shouldn't dare use the character name Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, Fleming doggedly replied, "Oh yes I will, and not only that, we're going to get away with it!"
The writer learned to take criticism with a grain of salt. When the head of Fleming's American publishing house expressed disappointment with The Spy Who Loved Me, the author pointed out that "oddly enough the very reasons for your doubts about it are those put forward by Capes [Fleming's publisher in London] for any special virtues it possesses." Hence the necessity of thick skin — the reason one person hates your creative work might be exactly the reason someone else loves it.
Fleming also received his fair share of brickbats from critics, fans, and even friends, but took it in stride. He deflected silly suggestions, rude comments, and hate mail alike in a lighthearted, gentlemanly manner. "You are mad to think that I am thin-skinned about criticisms," he reflected in one letter. "One longs for them."
Expert suggestions from his audience, on the other hand, he found invaluable.
5.) Listen to your audience
As Fleming's popularity grew, so too did his audience. Despite his incredible attention to detail, experts in their respective fields often wrote in with all manner of advice and corrections.
"In the 1950s... the world was more innocent," remarked Fergus Fleming, the author's nephew and editor of The Man with the Golden Typewriter. "When British policemen chased a suspect they blew whistles or, more dashingly, rang a little bell at the front of their car. Guns were uncommon currency." As such, despite Ian Fleming's activity in the war, his choice of weaponry for James Bond was naive. For firearm experts among his readership, it drove their suspension of disbelief past its breaking point.
For example, Geoffrey Boothroyd, a gun expert living in Glasgow, wrote to Fleming in 1956 and blew a hole in his credibility. "I like most of the things about [James Bond]," Boothroyd wrote to the author, "with the exception of his rather deplorable taste in firearms." He critiqued Bond's choice in everything from pistols and rifles to the holster hidden under his jacket. But Fleming was delighted. He took the suggestions seriously and after volumes of correspondence, "anointed Boothroyd as Bond’s fictional armourer and charged him, in real life, with answering the many queries that came in about his guns."
Similarly, in 1961 Fleming received a letter from Herman W. Liebert, a librarian and scholar at Yale University. Liebert, a huge fan of the Bond books, was appalled by the faux-American language and slang used by Fleming's supposedly US-based characters. He sent a long list of suggested replacements for words like "sponge bag," "damnably," "gammy," "arse-end," "chap," and "by gum," joking that "I don’t think an American has said this since the recent death of A. Lincoln." In response, Fleming thanked him profusely, incorporated most suggestions, and asked him to be an unofficial fact-checker and editor for future Bond books.
When it came to suggestions and expertise from fans, Fleming was all ears. He valued - and deeply understood - his audience. That empathy was also key to developing his best-selling writing techniques.
6.) Build your unique toolbox
"I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money," Fleming confessed in "How to Write a Thriller." He was a craftsman — describing himself as a writer rather than an author. He felt that "There are authors and artists and then again there are writers and painters.” Where the target of an author's work is the head and, to some extent, the heart, Fleming said his books aimed "somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh."
But that's not to say he cheapened his work. Fleming was a professional, and he bore no illusions about his genre, audience, or expertise.
"My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, aeroplanes or beds."
Fleming had a journalistic, "workmanlike" style and an arsenal of effective writing techniques. He relied on rich visual descriptions, near-cartoonish villains, visceral emotions, and potent action — all qualities which, as it happened, translated perfectly to the big screen. He maintained an "unmannered prose style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in [the] narrative." In other words, a book that highlights the hero and story, not the author and their indulgent writing.
Above all, Fleming believed that best-sellers share one vital quality: "you simply have to turn the page." To achieve the effect, he developed an array of tools and literary gadgets.
Fleming used movement, momentum, and pacing to deadly effect. For example, he manipulated sentence, paragraph, and chapter length to heighten the intensity of action sequences, or to build inertia as the books reached their crescendos. He also shifted the level of resolution in his stories, starting with a more objective, bird's eye view, then gradually zooming in on Bond's more immediate, personal perspective. Fleming paid special attention to the finer details as well:
"You cannot linger too long over descriptive passages. There must be no complications in names, relationships, journeys or geographical settings to confuse or irritate the reader... Above all, there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders on about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects on what he might have done or what he proposes to do next."
In addition, Benson observed another tactic that helped turn the Bond stories into best-selling page-turners. He called it "The Fleming Sweep." Fleming ended chapters with tantalizing "hooks" which heightened tension and pulled the reader deeper into the book. For example, a late chapter in Dr. No ends with:
"Head first, Bond’s body shot out of the shaft and fell through the air, slowly, slowly, down towards the gunmetal sea that waited for him a hundred feet below."
Without knowing a thing about the story or the stakes, as the protagonist's body plummets down toward the ocean surface, you can't help but wonder what happens next. Fleming compels his reader to turn the page, and "sweeps" them into the next chapter.
From a technical standpoint, Fleming's writing was sound and well-suited to his genre and audience. He knew how to create a readable, credible, magnetic story. But there were other, more distinct tools and tactics that made him truly unique, and helped the Bond books redefine a genre.
7.) Stick to your themes
Any aspiring writer knows the value of metaphor and simile in writing, but how do you take the technique to the next level? To elevate the quality of his descriptions and metaphors while simultaneously establishing a unique sense of style, Fleming relied on specific - albeit repetitive - Bond-appropriate themes.
With his routine "spearfishing and underwater exploring" expeditions in Jamaica, Fleming knew well the mysterious, predatory nature of the undersea world. Subsequently, the sea and its inhabitants offered a trove of compelling metaphors for James Bond's travails in espionage.
In Casino Royale, Bond endeavors to bankrupt Le Chiffre, the paymaster of a Soviet-controlled trade union in France, in a high-stakes game of baccarat. The "shoe" - the baccarat table - is more than just a green, baize-covered countertop. To James Bond it is a murky, foreboding lagoon filled with predacious terrors:
Early on, Bond plays successfully and other interested gamblers join in: "As he seemed to be in luck," Fleming writes, "one or two pilot fish started to swim with the shark."
When the croupier (dealer), passes cards to a competitor, the player's hands "lay inert like two watchful pink crabs on the table."
A man joins at seat number 9, "a distinguished but weak-looking man whose francs were presumably provided by his rich American wife, a middle-aged woman with the predatory mouth of a barracuda."
As the croupier deals his cards, Bond observes them "slithering,' not merely sliding, over the green baize.
Later, when Bond requests his cards, "the croupier slipped them into the green lagoon" between 007's outstretched arms.
The "pink crabs" return later in From Russia, with Love when a Soviet chess master moves his piece: "Like the pincers of a pink crab, his thumb and forefinger had opened, then they had descended. The hand, holding a piece, moved up and sideways and down." The move leaves his opponent's stomach in knots, "writhing in agony like an eel pierced with a spear."
For Fleming, guns and military machines offer another bucket of reliable metaphors:
When Bond steps into the shaft containing the Moonraker missile in the eponymous novel, Fleming says it "was like being inside the polished barrel of a huge gun."
The author recycles the previous metaphor in other stories, for example in Dr. No, when Bond is trapped in a claustrophobic metal shaft.
As Bond scuba dives in Live and Let Die, a shark glides above him "like a glaucous tapering airship."
In a near-deadly encounter with a barracuda, Fleming describes the fish as "over four feet long, a nickel bullet of muscle and hard flesh."
Ever the naturalist, Fleming also drew inspiration from animals and plants to animate his characters:
One character's laugh is "like the dry chuckle of a geckko" [sic].
Another is "like a wounded dog" who "snarled when anyone tried to come near him."
As a superior briefs a Russian agent, he glares intently, "pointing at her like a gun-dog."
One villain's bloodshot eyes are like "two blackcurrants poached in blood."
In Diamonds are Forever, as a threatening man in a midnight-blue tuxedo observes Bond at a card table, Fleming compares the scene to "a tiger watching the tethered donkey and yet sensing danger."
Finally, Fleming weaves a general air of mystery and danger into his spy thrillers. As bond prepares to scuba dive in Live and Let Die, "the stars winked down their cryptic morse and he had no key to their cipher." As he wades underwater toward the villain's ship, it was like "walking through thousands of millions of secrets. In three hundred yards, alone and cold, he would be blundering through a forest of mystery towards a deadly citadel whose guardians had already killed three men." In You Only Live Twice, James Bond's comrade prophesies, in foreboding, archetypal language, that he is to "enter this Castle of Death and slay the Dragon within."
Of course, like any great hero of ancient myth, this is Bond's specialty.
8.) Thrill the reader by engaging their senses
For Fleming, the perfectly exciting book contains something fascinating on every page. Whether he described the story's chaotic climax or a character eating breakfast, his goal was "total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his tastebuds."
In The Art of Memoir, author Mary Karr describes this engagement of the senses as "carnal writing," emphasizing that it is key to engaging, sophisticated prose:
"Carnality sits at the root of the show-don’t-tell edict that every writing teacher harps on all the time, because it works. By carnal, I mean, Can you apprehend it through the five senses? … Getting sophisticated about carnal writing means selecting sensual data - items, odors, sounds - to recount details based on their psychological effects on a reader. A great detail feels particular in a way that argues for its truth. A reader can take it in. The best have extra poetic meaning. In some magic way, the detail from its singular position in a room can help to evoke the rest of the whole scene."
Fleming bombarded his reader with carnal details. You feel your heart racing and knuckles aching through his description of a car chase or fight scene. When Bond senses danger, your adrenaline surges vicariously and your senses sharpen. Palpable aftershaves, colognes, perfumes, and other, sometimes less pleasing smells pervade his novels. Famously, and almost to the point of self-parody, he described Bond's meals and cocktails in vivid, mouthwatering detail. Only by engaging each of the senses could Fleming truly immerse readers in the world of James Bond.
But to keep his audience engaged, Bond's outlandish world needed to retain some sense of familiarity.
9.) Ground your writing in reality
Fleming admitted that his thrillers went "wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible." He made a point to ground his writing in reality, helping readers suspend disbelief no matter how farfetched an event or storyline. He accomplished this in part through "the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure [the reader] that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground." Fleming explained in more detail:
"This is where the real names of things come in useful. A Ronson lighter, a 4.5 litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers supercharger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even James Bond’s Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these details are points de repère to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure."
In The James Bond Dossier, novelist and poet Kinglsey Amis called this The Fleming Effect, "the imaginative use of information, whereby the pervading fantastic nature of Bond's world ... [is] bolted down to some sort of reality, or at least counter-balanced."
While the trick is effective, it is only supplemental. Readers scarcely flock to Fleming's books to hear that James Bond shaves with a Hoffritz safety razor. They want to hear about the razor-sharp throwing knives hidden in Bond's attaché case, or a barracuda's razorlike teeth cutting through 007's scuba suit.
10.) Juxtapose mundanity with exoticism
Fleming's thrillers offer readers a much-needed sense of escapism and vicarious adventure:
"What I aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism... I think you will find that the sun is always shining in my books—a state of affairs which minutely lifts the spirit of the English reader—that most of the settings of my books are in themselves interesting and pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places around the world, and that, in general, a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of Bond’s adventures. This, so to speak, 'pleasures' the reader."
Normal, humdrum life depresses James Bond. He grows restless and miserable in a dreary office, flooded with the "intolerable drudgery" of paperwork and routine. Surely his fans - then and now - can relate. But beautiful lovers, fast cars, exotic islands, storied cities, and heart-pumping action revivify 007, and in the process, awaken the reader's inner adventurer. Brawls with hooligans, deadly shootouts, and harrowing near-death experiences fill the character, and in turn his fans, with vitality. For that, the books, and later the movies, became famous.
To borrow a line from Billy Joel, readers rely on Fleming's stories "to forget about life for a while." To feel the thrill of being Bond, stepping into his glossy black dress shoes or damp scuba suit, if only for a few hours.
11.) Create an aspirational hero
The allure and staying power of James Bond stems from his charisma, charm, formidability, and glamor. He visits exotic places, plays with powerful gadgets, drives luxurious vehicles, blows things up, out-gambles his foes, out-boxes their henchmen, and in the end, saves the world and gets the girl. With his top-secret missions and his double-0 "license to kill" clearance, he exists outside of the normal world. For most readers, Bond is an aspirational, albeit unattainable, persona.
But the character's origin story is one of contradiction and contention.
Ironically, Fleming initially set out to create an unexceptional hero, a generic automaton through which his readers could live vicariously:
“When I wrote the first one, in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be the blunt instrument. One of the bibles of my youth was ‘Birds of the West Indies,’ by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, My God, that’s the dullest name I’ve ever heard, so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.”
As Fleming continued the series, the character and narratives evolved and exploded in popularity. Even President John F. Kennedy became a James Bond fanatic, citing From Russia with Love as one of his favorite books. Fleming admitted that Bond became "a compound of all the secret agents and commando types I met during the war." The author fleshed out 007's personality and backstory, and imbued the character with many of his own luxurious and eccentric tastes and tendencies.
One of Bond's most famous proclivities, of course, involved the opposite sex. In this respect, Fleming's work has not aged entirely well. Perhaps because he wrote for the Average Joe in postwar Britain, his depictions of women ranged from simplistic to preposterous to, as Daniel Craig famously attested, misogynistic.
But the franchise and its love stories, at their core, deal in archetypal themes. The bread and butter of Fleming's work is the archaic "princess and dragon" motif: Bond saves a stunning woman - usually a type of empowered, albeit unidimensional damsel in distress - in the process of defeating some devilish, ingenious, often grotesque villain.
Notably, in some cases Fleming reverses the roles. Bond himself is trapped and ultimately rescued by a fickle femme fatale. More than once, he charms the villain's imposing mistress, compels her to switch sides, and in the end, she saves him from some elaborate execution. In one fell swoop, Bond takes the bad guy's wife and his life and rides off into the sunset.
The spoils of victory usually include a trip to the bedroom, if not the altar. "To Fleming's target audience," comments the BBC, "emerging from both post-war austerity and traditional codes of morality, womanizing was just another aspirational activity like driving fast cars and sipping cocktails."
The books gave way to the movies, and in turn, the blunt Bond of prose gave way to the suave, sophisticated movie-Bond. In 1962, a young Sean Connery starred as 007 in Dr. No., and almost overnight the spy stories ascended from popular thriller series to worldwide phenomenon.
Soon, Fleming grew disenchanted with writing the 007 novels and redirected his enthusiasm toward helping produce the early Bond films. When he needed a break from Bond entirely, he absconded to other, unrelated projects: nonfiction works like The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities, or the children's story Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, which became a hit in its own right.
Fleming proved that his success was no mere flash in the pan. His judgment, writing prowess, and creative routine held merit beyond the realm of spy books.
12.) Build a disciplined writing routine
Fleming described himself as lazy and easily discouraged at the prospect of writing a 60,000+ word book. But unlike many would-be novelists, the old veteran learned to work around his limitations. He devised his own isolated artistic sanctuary, and implemented an efficient routine to remove willpower from the equation and maximize his productivity.
First, Fleming sought to "create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work." So during his employment at Kemsley Newspapers, the author negotiated for two months of vacation each winter and spent the duration at Goldeneye, his Jamaican estate.
Once he isolated himself in paradise, he coaxed the Muse into visiting through an efficient, workmanlike writing routine. As he explained in one interview:
"I find that unless I stick to a routine, if I just wait for genius to arrive from the skies, it just doesn't arrive... I just get on with the work."
Fleming woke around 7:30am and swam in his private Caribbean cove. He ate breakfast and then relaxed until 10:00am, at which point he dragged himself to his typewriter. Fleming wrote for a solid two hours without stopping to edit, then stepped away to lounge on the beach or snorkel through the nearby coral reefs. Afterward he settled into an afternoon nap before returning to the typewriter, refreshed and recharged, for another hour of work.
Fleming was self-aware, keenly observant of his own strengths and preferences as a writer. Rather than plow through the book using sheer discipline, he alternated between diligent work and deep relaxation, a routine that helped him consistently write an average of 2,000 words per day. After several weeks and 60-80,000 words, he began his rounds of editing, amplifying, and polishing.
By secluding himself in his dedicated writing space and adhering to a consistent but realistic and self-aware routine, Fleming reliably produced one book bestselling per year for over a decade.
13.) Aim high
"The Second World War left him with two ambitions," Fergus Fleming said of his uncle. "The first was to build a house in Jamaica, which he had visited during operations. The second was, as he declared, to write the spy story to end all spy stories."
Ian Fleming was keenly aware of a division in the thriller genre: cliché, dime-a-dozen mysteries and whodunits on one side, and on the other, high-caliber "thrillers designed to be read as literature." In the latter category, he cited authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler, and Graham Greene. "I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these," he resolved. Fleming set his crosshairs on the best of the best and, as the saying goes, worked until his idols became his rivals.
Fleming pursued his creative ambitions as vehemently as Bond pursuing his evil villains, and ultimately ascended to the pinnacle of his genre. But a strong temptation to rest on his laurels blew across the peak of Thriller Mountain. In one letter, Fleming facetiously remarked that "It is... very difficult to find new ways of killing and chasing people and new shapes and names for the heroines." Nonetheless, he strove to continually raise the bar, develop his creative skillset, enhance even the most banal details, and surprise readers.
Fleming pushed the boundaries with each successive book, stepping out of his own - and his readers' - comfort zone. Throughout the series he introduced fantastical new villains, allies, gadgets, plotlines, twists, narrators, and settings. For example, in The Spy Who Loved Me, Fleming wrote a large portion of the book from the perspective of a young woman named Vivienne Michel. After leaving home for a solo trip through Europe, Vivienne run into trouble and eventually encounters, and of course falls in love with, James Bond. Inevitably, this bait-and-switch upset some fans. They purchased the book expecting to find Bond beside a beautiful woman at a baccarat table or in some exotic hotel, not see the world through her eyes. As Fergus Fleming wrote: "for the time (and for the author) it was a brave stab at reinventing Bond."
Brave — it's an apt way to describe Fleming's books and aspirations. His work and ideas embedded themselves so deeply embedded into Western culture that even parodies became cliché. But when the writer first manned his golden typewriter, the spy-thriller genre was a tiny niche, and he knew it. Success was far from inevitable.
Ian Fleming threw himself headlong into his first novel and the reward was a surprisingly positive reception. Without hesitation, he sought to capitalize on the early success, exclaiming to his publishers:
"I feel it would be very unadventurous if we did not set our sights high! The field of thriller writers is extremely bare. There is a vacuum to be filled and I really do not see why we should not fill it."
Fleming endeavored to write best-sellers and tailored his approach accordingly. He relied on a fast-paced journalistic style, undistracting prose and grammar, a commitment to research, accuracy, and authenticity, and an intuitive grasp of what makes a thriller truly thrilling. He blended fact and fiction, detail and action, mundanity and exoticism, love and violence, and produced, like a masterful cocktail, a world-renowned franchise and a perennial character.
James Bond remains one of the most popular - not to mention commercially viable - characters of all time. He is a British cultural icon, so much so that at one point, he emerged from the world of fiction to escort real-life Queen Elizabeth II to the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
Mega-brands like Heineken and Aston Martin pay handsomely for product placement in the films. Superstar songwriters vie for the opportunity to write and perform the next Bond title theme. In recognition of his legacy, Fleming is consistently included among Britain's most influential writers.
And it all started with the talented but inexperienced author escaping to a cottage in Jamaica, terrified at the prospect of marriage, dreaming up a fantastical spy story to quell his adventurous spirit and occupy his idle mind.
Cue the Bond theme.
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