An Insider's Guide to Writing for Mills & Boon

Do you have a romance novel percolating within you? The Guardian offers some advice.

From the piece...

In Kendrick's and Jordan's cases, they clearly do. Jordan is the acknowledged queen of Mills & Boon. She's been writing for the publisher since 1981, has produced more than 170 novels and sold more than 70m books around the world. Kendrick, meanwhile, has just delivered her 75th book. That's 75 heroes, 75 heroines, 75 all-consuming love affairs and an estimated 150 sweaty sex scenes – Mills & Boon couples usually do it at least twice in the course of their 55,000-word romances. How, exactly, do these authors keep it up?

"It is very difficult to have a new take on an old story, and romance is an old story – it's been there forever. It has to ring true to the reader but at the same time you have to write in a way that keeps them turning pages," says Jordan, who churns out 5,000 words a day, writing four Mills & Boon novels a year, as well as two sagas for HarperCollins as Annie Groves. "You know you've got to grab their attention by the end of the first page." In fact, in her romance A Bride for His Majesty's Pleasure, the scene is set by the end of the first paragraph: "'And if I refuse to marry you?' Although she did her best not to allow her feelings to show, she was conscious of the fact that her voice trembled slightly. Max looked at her. 'I think you know the answer to your own question.'" The reader knows what they'll be getting – ruthless ruler, virgin bride – right from the start.

Jordan always begins, she says, with the issue the characters have to overcome in order to be together. "Romance is romance. For me a lot of the fun of writing comes from the problems I give the characters. They have to deal with them in order to feel confident with the relationships they have," she says. "I start with the central conflict, with the problem, then I build characters who will enable the problem to work from the readers' point of view. In the book I've just finished, neither the hero nor the heroine want commitment. He's a bit of a playboy, she's quite withdrawn. It goes back to them both feeling abandoned by their parents."