Caroline Anderson Talks Mills & Boon

01 January 2010

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In Caroline Anderson's career she has written over eighty novels and is a well known scribe of romance novels Mills & Boon.

- Could you tell our readers what it’s like to be a Mills&Boon writer?

Lonely, hard-working. I think it’s a sort of thing you shouldn’t do unless you can’t help yourself because when you are writing a book you become completely involved into the world of your characters to the point that your own family ceases to exist and sometimes they will point this out.

- Does that also mean that you have to produce a certain number of books every year?

Yes, because your publisher has a schedule and they have to guarantee their production. Because they produce so many books in each line they need to know exact number of authors contributing to these lines.

Sometimes you get a call asking if you could submit a book earlier, sometimes you are asked to do a Christmas book, a Valentine’s Day book or Mother’s Day book but I generally write four books a year.

- You have written many medical romance novels. How did you become interested in this genre?

Well, I wanted to write romances for a start because I like happy endings. There are times in woman’s life when you need something light. We need to read books that don’t leave you absolutely sad once you finish. And I wanted to write such books because I wanted to be left at the end of a book with happy feelings.

Also I was a nurse very briefly when I left school and I worked in one way or another in medical field for a few years. My mother has been a nurse, I had been a nurse and my children had some accidents and ended up in hospital.

But it didn’t occur to me until I visited a Mills&Boon meeting where they were trying to encourage new authors in a little venue in Ipswich where I lived. There was a medical author there and a Mills&Boon editor who’d come to talk to this group.

And I was absolutely fascinated because it occurred to me that I can write medical romances. I’ve had a couple of rejections: they kept telling me that I had plenty of secondary characters but I had a theme, which, I knew, would fit very well within the framework. Now I write for other lines apart from medical and my latest Christmas book does not fit into medical line.

- Would you say that medical background helps you to write now?

Caroline Anderson: It’s a long time since I did my nursing but yes, absolutely. Because i understand now what it’s like as person having had children in hospital and I know what it’s like from a patient’s side but I also know what it’s like from the other side pressures, responsibilities and frustration when you know you can’t help somebody.

- How do you actually create your plots? Do you take them from real-life situation?

Well I create, if you like, situations that could occur in real life but I don’t ever look at a family for example and think: 'I could write their story'. Obviously I might get ideas from real life but I would never take a real life situation and just reproduce it.

- Being a successful writer with over 80 books published, what kind of literature do you read yourself?

Well I read a lot of romances; some writers are frightened to read them because their voice and style might be affected. I don’t worry about that at all. There are many books in this genre but essentially every book is different and I enjoy them.

I think you have to do what you enjoy. You have to enjoy reading in order to be able to write them. But apart from that I like autobiographies and thrillers and crime books. I love funny books as well.

- And what about your family? Do they read your books?

My husband has read the first and the fourth. He thought the first was quite good, but he didn’t like the fourth that much and he hasn’t read others. So I told him: 'When you retire I’m going to sit you down in front of 80 and something books, it’ll probably be a hundred by then, and make you read them all. And then you can comment.'

My children are both girls and they do from time to time read them.

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