Hey, Ian Fleming, I got your bird right here

I think I’m doing something wrong.

I always thought writing was supposed to be hard. Pain and suffering are part of the deal, right?

Maybe not. Maybe I’ve had the wrong mindset.

Recently I came across a social media post that showed Ian Fleming’s daily schedule. Fleming, of course, wrote the James Bond novels. He cranked out lively, imaginative, exciting stuff, and tons of it. He must have suffered like crazy producing all those novels, no?

No.

From the looks of Fleming’s typical daily schedule, writing was a day at the beach, literally.

Here’s what his day looked like:

7:30 am – Get up with the birds and bathe in the ocean, then back for breakfast, scrambled eggs, and sit in the garden until 10 am.

10 am – Sit down and write 1500 words without looking back.

12: 15 am – Snorkel around the bay looking for lobsters, then come back and have a couple of pink gins with lunch.

2:30 – 4 pm – Siesta.

4 pm – Sit in garden for an hour, then go for another swim.

5 pm – Write another 500 words, put them in a folder and have a couple of powerful drinks.

7 pm – Dinner and Scrabble with wife Ann.

10 pm – To bed.

Hey, Ian, give me a break! Where’s the suffering? You called yourself a writer?

But wait, I thought, maybe there’s a lesson here. Maybe I should try to have an Ian Fleming day. So I tried. Here’s how it went:

7:30 am – Get up with the birds, wonder why the birds have to make such a racket when I’m trying to sleep. If I was Hemmingway, I’d grab my shotgun. Throw open the drapes, lean out and flip the bird to the birds, who chirp back mockingly. Go for breakfast, a Clif bar, and sit in the garden for two minutes, until the gnats and yellowjackets realize I’m holding a gooey Clif bar.

10 am – Sit down and write 1500 words without looking back. Think, “That’s a badass way of writing about your writing, ‘without looking back.’ ” Then I look back, and delete the 1500 words, giving myself a mulligan, ignoring the reality that only crappy, sad, phony golfers need a mulligan.

12:15 pm – Rummage around the garage, searching for my snorkel. Get sidetracked by a box of old high school yearbooks. “Most likely to succeed.” Make a mental note to write an apology letter to all my old classmates. Then think, “Why makes them so high and mighty? Are any of them cranking out 1500 words every morning before they go lobster snorkeling?”

2:30 pm – Siesta. My ass. Discover a hole in the hammock, chewed by squirrels. Worse, one of the bushy bastards is still laying in the hammock. And he is not, apparently, hammock-broken.

4 pm – Sit in garden. Wife leans out window and says, “You’re sitting in the garden? Must be nice. You’ve got all that spare time, maybe grab that hoe and hack down some weeds before the neighbors report us.” Consider going for a swim in the ocean, then realize I don’t live by an ocean, but if I did, I would swim in it a couple times a day, like some spy author I could name, and that would clear my head and make writing easy. Fleming did more swimming than Michael Phelps. Hey, whatever works. Make mental note to move to an ocean.

5 pm – Write another 500 words and put them in a folder. Wonder how soon I’m going to run out of room for all these folders. Wonder if this was the problem for Trump, he had no room to store all those classified documents he kept, so he stacked some of them in a public bathroom at Mar-a-Lago. Consider that, even though storing classified documents that way is illegal and puts our nation in grave danger, it is also a thoughtful courtesy to Trump’s guests. You sit down in the bathroom, sometimes you need something to read.

7 pm – Dinner with Kathy. Not lobster. Scrabble with Kathy. Lose again, my losing streak becoming DiMaggioesque. She wins with the word “lobster.” I explain to her that I save my best words for my writing. She gives the charming eye-roll that made me fall in love with her.

10 pm – Go to bed feeling better, realizing Ian Fleming and I are more alike than I had thought. Feel less guilty about all those stiff drinks. Have a nightmare: A giant lobster has my nose in its claw. Great opening scene for my next spy novel. It will write itself!