Writing Diaries #2, a writer's struggles
- Elvira Cordileone
- Jun 19
- 3 min read
I wish I could write at the speed May Agnes Fleming did. In her short life (she died in 1880 at age forty of Bright’s disease, a disease of the kidneys) Fleming produced forty-two novels and many short stories. In between writing she raised three kids and managed an alcoholic husband until she kicked him out five years before her death.
Fleming makes me ashamed because, although I was a newspaper reporter for a long time, I limited my creative writing to short pieces and long observations about the world and my state of mind. I have a whole big box of scribblings in my closet to prove it.
I’ve longed to write a novel since my teens but the idea overwhelmed me until I reached my fifties. It took me ten years to finish my first novel, The Fury, a thriller, and seven years after completion, it's still in search of a publisher . But finishing the novel gave me the confidence to tackle my memoir, Elvie: Girl Under Glass, and the skill to write it as though it were a novel. The memoir took me only a year to write and not long after it landed with a publisher. Now, I’m more or less working on the sequel to The Fury, a mystery set in Italy I’ve named, Blood Ties.
The thing is, writing long fiction is truly demanding and requires discipline. You’re trying to create a whole world and well-rounded people living in it. But now that I’ve had a book published the drive to write isn’t as intense. So much easier to take my dog for a walk or read what other people have written rather than the uphill work of telling my story so that every single piece fits the big puzzle, and in words and images that will pull a reader into another dimension, the world my brain has conjured.
How did May Agnes Fleming acquire such drive, such discipline?
Fleming is Canada’s first best-selling novelist. Born in Saint John New Brunswick in 1840, she sold her first story to the New York Mercury at fifteen. In 1875 she moved to the U.S. to be near her publisher. By then she had been earning around $15,000 a year, equivalent to about $450,000 today.
Okay, May Fleming didn’t write Nobel-Prize-winning literature. But do you know what? Many of her novels are still in print. She told stories geared to women readers, stories filled with adventure and romance, with female characters defying the typical stereotypes of her era to give women an escape from mundane domestic life, a release from “rebellious impulses,” some critics of the day suggested. I’d love to write a gothic novel or two if I had it in me, which I don’t.
In an introduction to Investigating Women: Female Detectives by Canadian Writers, David Skene-Melvin describes Fleming’s books as melodramas “filled with plot twists, mystery, disguise, startling events, murder, evil women, suspense and true love. The villainous women – dark, passionate, and exotically foreign – was one of Fleming’s stock characters.”
Shortly before her death, Fleming talked about her writing routine to a New York World reporter:
"Well, I fancy they are a little peculiar. In the first place, I cannot write with any advantage except in the spring. I seem to have to get thawed out. I usually begin my stories about the first of May and finish them in the middle of June. I lock myself in a room at 9 o’clock in the morning – the merest sound disturbs me – and I write steadily, if I can, until 12 o’clock. Then I stop and do not allow myself to think of the story until 9 o’clock the next morning. It is sometimes difficult to do this, but I find it necessary to my health."
She hand wrote seven hundred to a thousand pages of foolscap to complete a novel and worked every day but Sunday. One she’d finished the first draft, she took herself into the countryside for the final polish, and rarely made any major changes in the actual story line.
May Agnes Fleming left a controversial will. She cut out her husband, William Fleming, and made their children the sole beneficiaries. To ensure he wouldn’t try to assert paternal rights and take over their assets, the will stipulated in the even he acquired paternal rights, the income she’d provided for their children would stop and their assets held in trust until each child reached the age of majority. (William Fleming lost all attempts to challenge the will in court.)
One hundred forty-five years after Fleming died, her books are sold on Amazon, and I found eBooks available from the Toronto Public Library. Amazing.
For more information about May Agnes Fleming:
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