On the Virtues of Mills & Boon
Seriously
For London cabbies, there is always a single Formula One driver.
When someone cuts them up, and they aren’t happy about it, they can’t help but say, ‘Who do you think you are, Ayrton bloody Senna?’
A few years ago, their curse became, Lewis bloody Hamilton and I guess now it’s Max bloody Verstappen.
(I don’t take many cabs.)
Sadly, in order to be the precise object of their disgust, you need to be the World’s Number One driver and to have a rep for aggressive overtaking.
A resonant name isn’t enough in itself. So, sadly, they never said, Who do you think you are Emerson bloody Fittipaldi? or Juan bloody Pablo bloody Montoya.
Maybe American cabbies did.
Similarly, among Creative Writing students there always used to be a single ultimate diss for bad writing.
They would say, Well, at least I’m not writing Mills & Boon.
Of course, most of the time, they had never read a Mills & Boon novel. They were just referring to a form of fiction that they knew was a byword for trash.
I have read some Mills & Boon novels. Partly so that I could find out whether they were as bad as people said they were (they definitely weren’t), and partly as research for my novel Hospital.
Because I was trying to write a big book that contained all things medical — or as many as I could get in — I needed to include at least a hint of that disrespected sub-genre of romantic fiction, the Medical or Doctor Nurse Romance.
I spent a couple of days in the British Library having a great time reading titles such as Love Comes by Ambulance (Lisa Cooper, 1982) and Heart Murmurs (Grace Read & Lilian Darcy, 1985).
And I have, a long time ago, tried to write a Mills & Boon.
At Oxford University, with a fellow student, cynically, with the aim of making easy money, we sent off for the Mills & Boon Guide to Writing Romance Fiction.
It came back, a pamphlet through the post.
I remember one sentence from it —
You have to take it seriously.
We weren’t taking it seriously. We were having fatally ironic fun.
Fatal to our chances of publication.
Our Professor Student Romance (but no sex until she’s graduated) was entitled Terms of Love.
The heroine was called Emma Sparrow, or something like that.
The only detail I remember was that my co-writer insisted that when our heroine flutteringly arrived for her first tutorial, our hero would greet her with —
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert…Shelley’s lines from ‘To a Skylark’.
I’m not sure we got much further than this.
Because we weren’t taking it seriously.
My students most often referred to Mills & Boon when we were doing an in-class exercise on writing bad dialogue.
This is one of my favourites, the prompt simply being, Write the worst dialogue in the world, ever.
I put students in pairs for this, and usually one of the pairs will write something like —
‘I have always adored you, Emma,’ he said throbbingly intimately into her left ear, which did not need cleaning. ‘Since the very first time you floated into my lonely tutorial room and stole away my heart with your grace and delicacy.’
‘Oh Graham, my darling’ she replied, passionately, finally sure of his affections. ‘Why must we keep our love secret — until I’ve graduated.’
‘We must be strong, my love,’ he purred, like a Ferrari on the starting grid. ‘No-one must suspect a thing. It could cost me my entire career.’
Her heart dissolved as she melted into his arms.
It’s such fun.
Especially when read aloud.
All the things you’re absolutely not meant to do. Tell, don’t show. Adverbs aplenty. Clanging clichés.
When I follow up by asking the students, deadpan, to next Write the best dialogue in the world, ever — that’s when they get the point.
Of course, they don’t have to go through with it. I’m not that cruel. I let them off. I just want them, for a few awkward moments, to feel the fear.
And also to realise that there was a lot more energy and laughter in the room when the burden of instant literary achievement was taken away.
The students’ bad dialogue is usually very entertaining. But would never make it into a Mills & Boon novel, because it advertises its distance from what’s going on in the scene.
It is fatally ironic.
I don’t think it’s possible to write commercially, as it used to be called, if you aren’t taking the exact same pleasure in the genre that your readers are taking.
That’s what the Mills & Boon guide meant by take it seriously.
There are writers who produce their romances cynically, I’m sure. However, in the moment of writing they are swept away — and they don’t mind being swept away, because they love that feeling, and they don’t mind calling it being swept away, because that’s what it is.
No more need be said, but also no less.
To write for Mills & Boon is to write for enraptured readers. And that’s a hard discipline. The sentences need to be beautifully functional, and not to demand attention as words on a page. Yes, there may be familiar phrases, but they are there to maintain the trance.
In this, they are — at their best — like Agatha Christie’s perfect pitch prose: never underdone, never overdone.
However, among the many Mills & Boon writing styles, some more expansive than others, there is greater space for the kind of small or great dilation of the moment and emotion than Christie would allow herself.
To write in this way means the opposite of indulging yourself in overripe writing for its own silly sake. You are putting yourself entirely at your reader’s service. You are devoting yourself to giving them precisely what they desire.
Because you desire it, too.
Seriously.
[Cover Image: Olympic Surgeon by Margaret Barker]
Thank you for writing this! I was, until a couple of years ago, a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, and had friends who wrote for Mills and Boon - and others who desperately wanted to. It's hard work, but I believe the pay is good. They often earned-out. Then risked burn-out, trying to keep the momentum going.
M and B are very demanding - they know exactly what they want writers to produce, because they know exactly what readers want. I like dipping into Regencies (Janice Preston, Catherine Tilney, Sarah Mallory are my recommendations), and I'm a historian - and I know the amount of research that goes into Historicals. But it has to be worn lightly. I write WW2 sagas, and sagas aren't far from M and B in terms of people's derisiveness (that is, people who haven't read them!).
That's the skill of a Mills and Boon writer. Or saga writers. Or rom com writers. Or all the many other subgenres of romance, romantic fiction, and "women's commercial fiction". Without appearing writer-y, they transport readers emotionally, so that they are completely drawn into the imaginary world created by the author. It's not easy to do - just try keeping up the heart-wrenching emotion, while keeping the plot moving and following the beats, and ensuring there's enough historical detail to demonstrate where in time the characters are, without knocking readers over the head. Is your darkest moment dark enough? Are the stakes high enough? Is it historically convincing enough? Etc etc etc.
At the University of Birmingham, the English department used to (or still do?) run a women's popular fiction module. The tutor spoke to M and B, who one year sent the students boxes of free books. These ranged from hot rated sauce to historicals. The students took them home, and it wasn't long before several male housemates became addicted to Viking romances. There's action, drama, snogging, high stakes - it's not much different from blockbuster movies. But are blockbuster movies mocked as much as M and B, and romantic/women's fiction? They're not immune to mockery, but it doesn't seem as pointed.
This made me laugh so much! But it's also thought-provoking, of course. I too first started to write by trying to write a Mills & Boon - I think because it gave me a goal and a structure and a reason for writing any given sentence one way rather than another. Everything you say is true: it's hard, demanding work. It is possible, I gather, to make a good living as Helen suggests, but only if you're writing four a year or so.
I only gave up because I realised all the passages I found most satisfying to write and satisfactory when read, were the ones which veered most away from what I knew that kind of book and reader needed. So I decided I'd better follow where my writing was pointing: towards something else.
But it's good for any writer to read a "bad" book of a sort which sells well, and start thinking "What pleasures and satisfactions does this offer the reader? Why did a publisher think that was worth investing ££££ to publish? What does that tell me about readers? What does that mean for what/how I write mine?"