Writing Tools

When my writing needs an adrenaline shot, I pick up an old Ian Fleming novel and read an original adventure of British secret agent James Bond -- 007. (My definition of a bad copy editor, by the way, would be the one who would have called Bond '7,' no need for those redundant double 0's.)

I first read Fleming in the early 1960s, when the movies began their epic run. The books -- if you can ignore some dated ethnic stereotypes -- has a quality that appeals to me. The prose is both literary and lurid, appealing to multiple sensibilities at the same time, the way that Shakespeare could play to poetry-loving aristocrats or to the groundlings for the bawdy humor or bloody swordplay.

On my brother's recommendation, I picked up my old copy of "Casino Royale" and read it to compare and contrast it to the story line in the recent Bond movie. Although set in a different time period, the movie follows the script of the book with surprising fidelity.

I also enjoy reading Fleming because his writing strategies are close to the surface of the text, thus easy to decipher. Here are three paragraphs in which Bond muses about his relationship to the beautiful and mysterious Vesper Lynd:

He found he could speak to her easily, and he was surprised.

With most women his manner was a mixture of taciturnity and passion. The lengthy approaches to a seduction bored him almost as much as the subsequent mess of disentanglement. He found something grisly in the inevitability of the pattern of each affair. The conventional parabola -- sentiment, the touch of the hand, the kiss, the passionate kiss, the feel of the body, the climax in the bed, then more bed, then less bed, then the boredom, the tears, and the final bitterness -- was to him shameful and hypocritical. Even more he shunned the mise-en-scene for each of these acts in the play -- the meeting at a party, the restaurant, the taxi, his flat, her flat, then the week-end by the sea, then the flats again, then the furtive alibis and the final angry farewell on some doorstep in the rain.

But with Vesper there could be none of this.

Here's what I notice:

• The interesting pace that comes from a long paragraph, framed by two short ones.

• The great movement in that long paragraph from the abstract to the concrete, from the general to the specific. Just when we think we're stuck in the ozone of "taciturnity" or "inevitability," the prose dives back toward earth with mundane phrases like "then less bed" or "his flat, her flat."

• A vocabulary that varies from sophisticated and technical words such as "parabola" or "mis-en-scene" to Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as "kiss," "bed," and "rain."

• The acceleration of time in that long paragraph that comes from long sentences that fly across the narrative details of a standard romantic relationship between spy and lover.

What else do you see here that appeals to you?