Incidentally, a long time ago I came across this article by Ian Fleming about his approach to writing, and it rather informed my views on a whole lot of stuff ever since.
THE craft of writing sophisticated thrillers is almost dead. Writers seem to be ashamed of inventing heroes who are white, villains who are black, and heroines who are a delicate shade of pink.
I am not an angry young, or even middle-aged, man. My books are not "engaged". I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. 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.
I have a charming relative who is an angry young littérateur of renown. He is maddened by the fact that more people read my books than his. Not long ago we had semi-friendly words on the subject and I tried to cool his boiling ego by saying that his artistic purpose was far, far higher than mine. The target of his books was the head and, to some extent at least, the heart. The target of my books, I said, lay somewhere between the solar plexus and, well, the upper thigh. These self-deprecatory remarks did nothing to mollify him and finally, with some impatience, and perhaps with something of an ironical glint in my eye, I asked him how he described himself on his passport.
"I bet you call yourself an Author," I said. He agreed, with a shade of reluctance, perhaps because he scented sarcasm on the way. "Just so," I said. "Well, I describe myself as a Writer. There are authors and artists and then again there are writers and painters."
This rather spiteful jibe, which forced him, most unwillingly, into the ranks of the Establishment, while stealing for myself the halo of a simple craftsman from the people, made the angry young man angrier than ever and I don't now see him as often as I used to. But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money. I write, unashamedly, for pleasure and money.
I also feel that, while thrillers may not be Literature with a capital L, it is possible to write what I can best describe as "Thrillers designed to be read as literature", the practitioners of which have included such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene. I see nothing shameful in aiming as high as these.
All right then, so we have decided to write for money and to aim at certain standards in our writing. These standards will include an unmannered prose style, unexceptional grammar and a certain integrity in our narrative.
But these qualities will not make a bestseller. There is only one recipe for a bestseller and it is a very simple one. If you look back on the bestsellers you have read, you will find that they all have one quality: you simply have to turn the page.
Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this essential dynamic of the thriller. 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. He must never have to ask himself "Where am I? Who is this person? What the hell are they all doing?" Above all, there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders 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. By all means, set the scene or enumerate the heroine's measurements as lovingly as you wish, but in doing so, each word must tell and interest or titillate the reader before the action hurries on.
I confess that I often sin grievously in this respect. I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him furiously and shouting "Like this, damn you!" But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, Goldfinger, three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf.
Well, having achieved a workmanlike style and the all-essential pace of narratives, what are we to put in the book? Briefly, the ingredients are anything that will thrill any of the human senses - absolutely anything.
In this department, my contribution to the art of thriller-writing has been to attempt the total stimulation of the reader all the way through, even to his taste buds. For instance, I have never understood why people in books have to eat such sketchy and indifferent meals. English heroes seem to live on cups of tea and glasses of beer, and when they do get a square meal we never hear what it consists of. Personally, I am not a gourmet and I abhor wine-and-foodmanship. My favourite food is scrambled eggs. In the original typescript of Live and Let Die, James Bond consumed scrambled eggs so often that a perceptive proofreader suggested that this rigid pattern of life must be becoming a security risk for Bond. If he was being followed, his tail would only have to go into restaurants and say, "Was there a man here eating scrambled eggs?" to know whether he was on the right track or not. So I had to go through the book changing the menus.
It is surely more stimulating to the reader's senses if, instead of writing "He made a hurried meal off the Plat du Jour - excellent cottage pie and vegetables, followed by home-made trifle", you write "Being instinctively mistrustful of all Plats du Jour, he ordered four fried eggs cooked on both sides, hot buttered toast and a large cup of black coffee." The following points should be noted: first, we all prefer breakfast foods to the sort of food one usually gets at luncheon and dinner; secondly, this is an independent character who knows what he wants and gets it; thirdly, four fried eggs has the sound of a real man's meal and, in our imagination, a large cup of black coffee sits well on our taste buds after the rich, buttery sound of the fried eggs and the hot buttered toast.
What I aim at is a certain disciplined exoticism. I have not reread any of my books to see if this stands up to close examination, but 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 are in themselves pleasurable, taking the reader to exciting places round the world, and that a strong hedonistic streak is always there to offset the grimmer side of Bond's adventures.
At this stage, let me pause for a moment and assure you that, while all this sounds devilish crafty, it has only been by endeavouring to analyse the success of my books for the purpose of this essay that I have come to these conclusions. In fact, I write about what pleases and stimulates me.
My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside - for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed - but for two technical devices: first, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground. A Ronson lighter, a 4.5-litre Bentley with an Amherst-Villiers super-charger (please note the solid exactitude), the Ritz Hotel in London, the 21 Club in New York, the exact names of flora and fauna, even Bond's Sea Island cotton shirts with short sleeves. All these details are points de rep�re to comfort and reassure the reader on his journey into fantastic adventure.
People often ask me, "How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have."
I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don't think there is anything very odd about that. We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. There are three strong incidents in my first book, Casino Royale, which carry it along and they are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
The first was the attempt on Bond's life outside the Hotel Splendide.
SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box-camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other was of blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one contained a high-explosive bomb and the blue one a powerful smokescreen, under cover of which the two assassins could escape. One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in smoke before throwing the bomb. In fact, of course, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.
Far-fetched, you might say. In fact, this was the very method used in the Russian attempt on von Papen's life in Ankara in the middle of the war.
As to the gambling scene, this grew in my mind from the following incident: I and my chief, the Director of Naval Intelligence - Admiral Godfrey - in plain clothes, were flying to Washington in 1941 for secret talks with the American Office of Naval Intelligence before America came into the war. Our seaplane touched down at Lisbon for an overnight stop, and our Intelligence people there told us how Lisbon was crawling with German secret agents. The chief of these and his two assistants gambled every night in the casino at the neighbouring Estoril. I suggested to the DNI that he and I should have a look at these people. We went and there were the three men, playing at the high Chemin de Fer table. Then the feverish idea came to me that I would sit down and gamble against these men and defeat them, thereby reducing the funds of the German Secret Service.
It was a foolhardy plan which would have needed a golden streak of luck. I had �50 in travel money. The chief German agent had run a bank three times. I bancoed it and lost. I suivied and lost again, and suivied a third time and was cleaned out. A humiliating experience which added to the sinews of war of the German Secret Service and reduced me sharply in my chief's estimation. It was this true incident which is the kernel of James Bond's great gamble against Le Chiffre.
Finally, the torture scene. What I described in Casino Royale was a greatly watered-down version of a French-Moroccan torture known as Passer à la Mandoline, which was practised on several of our agents during the war.
Having assimilated all this advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I, too, am lazy. Probably rather lazier than you. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well-chosen words in order to produce a 60,000-word book.
In my case one of the first essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be filled by some form of creative work. I am fortunate in this respect. I built a small house on the north shore of Jamaica in 1946 and arranged my life so that I could spend at least two months of the winter there. For the first six years I had plenty to do during these months exploring Jamaica, coping with staff and getting to know the locals, and minutely examining the underwater terrain within my reef. But by the sixth year I had exhausted all these possibilities, and I was about to get married - a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidgets. To give my idle hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
Failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can strongly recommend hotel bedrooms. as far removed from your usual "life" as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions in the strange locale will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application.
The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine - and I mean strictly. I write for about three hours in the morning - from about nine till noon - and I do another hour's work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder.
I never correct anything and I never look back at what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. 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.
By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which is, in my case, in around six weeks. I spend about a week correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting short passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing?
First of all, they are financial. You don't make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and film rights, you do very well.
Above all, being a comparatively successful writer is a good life. You don't have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product, even if you only write thrillers.
© Ian Fleming 1962
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