Ian Fleming Day: Two Thousand Words a Morning

Ian Lancaster Fleming was born at 27 Green Street in Mayfair, London, on May 28, 1908, into a wealthy banking family. His father, Valentine, had been the Member of Parliament for Henley since 1910. He was killed by German shelling on the Western Front in 1917, when Ian was eight, and Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times.

Fleming died on August 12, 1964, at fifty-six, after a heart attack. In the twelve years between his first novel and his death he wrote twelve James Bond novels and two collections of Bond stories. He saw the first two films made and turned a character he’d invented on holiday into a franchise that has outlived him by sixty years.

The interesting part for a writer is how late and how methodically it happened. Fleming was forty-three when he sat down at a typewriter in Jamaica, and he’d spent most of his adult life failing at things his family expected him to do well.

What did Ian Fleming do before James Bond?

A list of careers that didn’t take.

He went to Eton in 1921 and then to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He left Sandhurst in 1927, after less than a year, without a commission. His mother sent him to a small private school at Kitzbühel in Austria, run by Ernan Forbes Dennis and the novelist Phyllis Bottome. He went there to prepare for a possible Foreign Office career, and he came out with much better languages.

In October 1931 he joined Reuters as a sub-editor, and in April 1933 the agency sent him to Moscow to cover the Metro-Vickers trial, where Soviet authorities prosecuted British engineers for espionage. He was twenty-four, reporting on a Soviet show trial about spies, and the experience gave him a first look at the opponent his hero would spend a decade fighting. Then he left journalism for money. He worked at a bank, Cull & Co., and moved to the stockbrokers Rowe and Pitman in 1935, and he was bad at both.

By the late 1930s he was a well-connected man about town with no particular achievement to his name. Then the war came.

What did Ian Fleming do in naval intelligence during World War II?

In 1939, months before the war began, Rear Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, recruited him. Fleming joined full time that August as Godfrey’s personal assistant, was commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a lieutenant, and was promoted to lieutenant commander a few months later.

The work suited him the way nothing else had. Godfrey put him in charge of Operation Goldeneye in 1941 and 1942, a plan to keep an intelligence network running in Spain if Germany took control there. In 1942 Fleming helped form 30 Assault Unit, a commando unit of specialist intelligence troops whose job was to grab documents and equipment from enemy headquarters before they could be destroyed. He was a planner and an administrator, a desk man who designed operations for others to carry out.

The war had found him at thirty-one, after a decade of false starts.

He never became a field agent himself. Everything he learned about the trade came from the office end of it.

That shows in the books, and in a good way. Bond’s world runs on briefings, gadgets, budgets, cover stories and the logistics of getting a man into place, and Fleming knew all of that from the inside. The fistfights and the casinos are fantasy. The machinery around them came from a man who’d spent six years watching how intelligence work gets organized.

How did Ian Fleming write Casino Royale so fast?

He’d built a house on the north coast of Jamaica in 1945 and named it Goldeneye, after the wartime operation. He spent his winters there.

On January 15, 1952, sitting at a desk in that house, he started typing a novel. By February 16 at the latest he’d finished it. Five weeks later, on March 24, 1952, he married Ann Charteris in Jamaica. He was forty-three, and he’d been talking for years about writing a spy story.

The method, in his own account, was to write straight through without looking back. Looking back on that first book in 1956, he said, “I rewrote nothing and made no corrections until my book was finished.” He typed his quota every morning, kept going until the story reached its end, and only then went back to fix it.

The novel opens in a casino at three in the morning, with the smell of the place. “The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning.” Bond is already at work, already tired, already watching. I open almost all my own novels the same way, with action first and the background filled in later, and Fleming’s opening shows how much a writer can establish by dropping the reader into a room and letting the smell do the introducing.

Jonathan Cape published Casino Royale in Britain on April 13, 1953. Demand was strong enough that it needed three print runs.

The ending turns on Vesper Lynd, the woman Bond falls for, and a betrayal planted in small details through the whole book. I love twisty plots set up with small hints, and Casino Royale does it with more care than its reputation as a fast pulp thriller suggests. The clues are there. Readers rushing for the next card game miss them.

Where did the name James Bond come from?

From the spine of a bird book.

Fleming was a keen birdwatcher, and on his shelf in Jamaica sat a guide to the birds of the Caribbean by an American ornithologist named James Bond. In a 1962 interview he said he’d wanted Bond to be “a blunt instrument,” and called the name “the dullest name I ever heard.” That was the point of taking it.

The choice was smarter than it looks. A flat, ordinary name keeps the character from announcing himself, and it puts the glamour into what he does and where he goes. Writers who name their heroes something dramatic give the reader a promise the character then has to keep. Fleming gave his hero a name with nothing in it and let the books fill it up.

What was Ian Fleming’s daily writing routine?

A quota, kept every working day without exception.

In a 1963 account of his method, he said he wrote for about three hours each morning and for about an hour in the evening, aiming at 2,000 words a day. “By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day,” he wrote, and the arithmetic does the rest. At that rate a short thriller of the kind he wrote comes together in six weeks or so of working days.

He did that every winter at Goldeneye for twelve years. A new Bond book came out almost every spring from 1953 on, each drafted in Jamaica in the first months of the year and revised back in London. The schedule was as reliable as a factory, and it had to be, because the books paid for the house.

Jack London ran his own famous quota at a thousand words a day, and the site’s page on Jack London Day covers what that did for him. Fleming doubled it. Both men understood something that writers waiting for a free afternoon miss: a book is a pile of days, and the pile only grows if the days come.

How did John F. Kennedy boost Ian Fleming’s sales?

On March 17, 1961, Life magazine published a list of President Kennedy’s ten favorite books, and From Russia, with Love was on it. Bond sales surged.

The next year Eon Productions released the first Bond film, Dr. No, in 1962. The site’s review of Dr. No (1962) covers how the film reshaped the character. Fleming saw the second film, From Russia with Love, before he died, and none after it.

The Kennedy list is a lesson in how books sell. Fleming had been publishing a book a year for eight years. One mention from the right reader changed everything. Nobody can plan publicity like that, and the books still had to be good enough to keep the readers it brought in.

What does not hold up in Ian Fleming’s Bond novels?

A great deal, and critics said so at the time.

In 1958 Paul Johnson reviewed Dr. No in the New Statesman under the headline “Sex, Snobbery and Sadism,” and called it “without doubt, the nastiest book I have ever read.” Johnson was exaggerating for effect, and he still had a case. The books linger on torture, the women are written as rewards, and the snobbery about clothes, food, cars and class runs through every chapter.

Johnson wasn’t alone. A month before Dr. No came out, the critic Bernard Bergonzi had published his own attack on the Bond books, and he compared Fleming unfavorably with Raymond Chandler and John Buchan. The comparison stung because Fleming admired Chandler and named him as an influence, alongside Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. In a radio discussion with Chandler, Fleming praised his dialogue as some of the finest in any prose of the day.

The racial attitudes are worse. Live and Let Die and Dr. No carry stereotypes that read as ugly now, and later editions have been revised to remove some of the language. A reader going back to the originals should expect to wince.

The plots also wear thin across twelve books. Fleming found a formula, with a briefing from M, a villain with a scheme, a woman, a capture, a torture scene and an escape, and he ran it with small variations. The quota that made him productive also made him repetitive. By the last books he was visibly tired of his hero, and so, at times, are the readers.

What can a writer learn from Ian Fleming?

Draft first and judge later. His refusal to reread until the end got a book finished in five weeks, and a finished draft is fixable. A half-finished one that’s been polished seven times can’t.

Use what you know. The intelligence machinery in the books came from his own desk at the Admiralty. That inside knowledge held up the fantasy built on top of it. Readers sense when a writer has sat in the room he’s describing, and they forgive a lot of nonsense in exchange.

Set a quota and protect it. A daily number turns a vague ambition into a measurable job, and a missed day shows up on the page count.

The split of the day matters less than the habit. My own writing day runs client work in the morning, my own books in the afternoon and client work again in the evening, and I cut a lot when I revise. Fleming split his day differently and saved his revisions for the end, and both approaches depend on the same thing: knowing exactly when the writing happens and refusing to give that time away.

And plant the twist early. Vesper’s betrayal works because the hints were there from the start, a technique covered in how to write a plot twist readers never see coming.

How should you mark Ian Fleming Day?

Read Casino Royale. It’s short, it’s the leanest of the twelve, and it shows what Fleming was before the films turned Bond into a brand. Then compare it with the 2006 film, the closest any adaptation has come to the book, and see the site’s ranking of the greatest James Bond films.

If you write, try his formula for a month. Pick a number of words you can hit every day, write that number, and don’t read back until the draft is done. If the book you want to write is a thriller or a memoir and you’d rather hand the drafting to a professional, look at ghostwriting services.

He also left one book for children. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, about a family and their magical car, came out in October 1964, two months after he died. It was his only children’s novel. The man who invented the most famous spy in fiction also enjoyed writing pure invention for an audience that didn’t care about tradecraft, brand names or gadgets, and the book became a film in 1968.

Children don’t read for the snobbery, and the book has none.

Fleming’s literary birthday sits among the year’s other author celebrations on the literature-related holidays calendar.

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