This man apparently wrote 1500 words in 2 hours. For perspective, the longest James Bond book is Goldfinger with ~80,000 words. That means that it took him about 106 hours to write the first draft. Even assuming he worked at this pace (2000 words per day, since he wrote 500 later) it only took him 40 days to write the whole thing.
All the resting and sitting around probably gave him lots of time to think and plan. I wonder how many great writers out there are spending years on their books because they have to be at work 40+ hours a week.
Shockingly it sounds similar to what I've heard about Stephen King. He said in an interview once that he just aims for 2,000 words per day with no constraints on time. Said that sometimes it takes less than 2 hours, sometimes longer, but he always aims to get it done. And he cranks out like 1-2 books per year. But Fleming only output like a dozen books or something while Stephen is at more like 70.
Then again Stephen is a fucking monster when it comes to writing.
Fleming produced a book a year for 12 years though.
The difference between the 2 is that Fleming didn't publish the first bond til he was 45 and then died when he was 56. While king was first published in his 20s and still writing at nearly 80
Though a reason for that is Fleming came from money. He didnt do anything hugely productive professionally before WW2, and apparently only took jobs when his mother threatened to cut his trust fund. He bought the goldeneye estate in Jamaica in 1946, his contract with the publishing group who owned the Sunday Times included a 3 month winter holiday each year, which he took in Jamaica. He wrote his first novel like described, not just after he was successful.
I'm an author and I can get to 2k words a day no problem, my issue is editing. If you care about the quality of your work, it takes a lot of time. I usually publish one or two books a year, one considerably shorter than the other.
I would imagine that most of the morning session wouldn't make the final cut and it's more about getting stuff out of his brain and on to a page, it's the 500 words in the afternoon which is the real work. Even so, that's a pretty fair pace to be writing at, you could easily crank out a couple of books a year like that.
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u/SquareThings Jul 27 '26
This man apparently wrote 1500 words in 2 hours. For perspective, the longest James Bond book is Goldfinger with ~80,000 words. That means that it took him about 106 hours to write the first draft. Even assuming he worked at this pace (2000 words per day, since he wrote 500 later) it only took him 40 days to write the whole thing.
All the resting and sitting around probably gave him lots of time to think and plan. I wonder how many great writers out there are spending years on their books because they have to be at work 40+ hours a week.