Penny Jordan Talks Sins

Penny Jordan is an author who has been having her work published for thirty years working for Mills and Boon and Harper Collins.

I caught up with her to talk about her new book Sins, her writing career and what lies ahead for her.

- Your new novel is called Sins so can you tell me a little bit about it?

It's a second book in a trilogy about a family that begins in Macclesfield, the first book starts in Macclesfield in the late twenties early thirties and the family own a silk mill. I lived in Macclesfield for twenty years and silk mills are part of the history of the area and I had the idea to write the books because I love fabric and could use some of my local knowledge on the subject.

The first book follows the patriarch of the family and the second book is about her daughter, two step daughters and her nice; and the sins refers to the sins of the past, some of which are secrets in the family that cause problems for the characters in the ongoing book.

I set this book in the late 1950's all the way to the seventies so I start off with them as four young women in London just before the swinging sixties and then into the seventies when they are married women and mothers.

It's about their lives and their problems and how the past has affected their present and their future and how things that have gone wrong and happened in the past have effected their childhood and putting in place certain beliefs and jealousies which cause a lot of trouble between them.

They each feel that they are not getting the parental love that they want and that has had an effect of then as women and how they react to other people. So the story of the book is really about unravelling the tangles of the past allowing then to move on with their lives.

- You have been having novels published for thirty years so how did you get into writing?

I have been writing for thirty years; I write for Mills and Boon, the short romances, and I write for Harper Collins with world war two sagas and now I’m going back to what I wanted to write about when I first started out.

What I like writing about are people’s relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life  and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are,  I do like a happy ending so my books have to have a happy ending.

 - How did you get into writing in the first place?

Well as a child I had always had a good imagination and made stuff up inside my head but I never thought of having a career in writing, I went to the grammar school only got three O Levels, trained as a secretary and had a job as a secretary. I was always a keen reader, I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing, I thought that writers were like demi-gods I don’t know what I thought.

But as I got into my twenties I started to want to write more, if I had read a book and enjoyed it I was carrying on the story inside my head.  Then I read somewhere that the Romantic Novelist Association were holding a competition for new writers and my husband said ’why don’t you go in for that? So I wrote a regency romance, because I like regency romances, and it didn’t win but I got semi-picked up by an agent and I wrote for a little while for him.

That taught me a lot about writing, because obviously I had had not formal training, and it helped to work out how you go about things, although I still think that I have a lot to learn, then I read that Mills and Boon were looking for new writers as they wanted to expand.

So I did one of those and they took me on so a lot of it was being in the right place at the right time, you can be a wonderful writer and not get the chances and be an ok writer and build on those.

- You have mentioned that you wrote for Mills and Boon so what is it like writing for one of the biggest book series in literature?

Well I still write for them but it’s changed a lot over the years. It’s a challenge but it’s fun as well, I’ve met some lovely writers with whom I’m still friends now, but writing the short books is really really difficult as you only have two characters and you have to keep those two characters in play throughout the whole of the fifty five thousand words, so it’s quite a discipline and very different from any other type of writing.

The majority of fiction books now the publishers will tell the authors that this is the kind of book that they want, which is what Mills and Boon do, and that’s no different from my editors at Harper Collins who tell me that they want world war two books.

Publishers have to produce what the market wants and writers have to produce what publishers want for the market, of course there are book that come from lesser fields that come right out of the blue and are huge successes but there are far fewer of those than the one where the public have said this is the kind of book that we want.

Writing for Mills and Boon taught me a lot of discipline, you have to produce books in a short time scale and four a year, and it teaches you a lot. When I come to writing the books that I’m doing now I have much more breathing space I can bring in other characters, I always think of the Mills and Boon books as one or two dimensional all you know about the characters is how they relate to each other but the other books they are three dimensional and you can explore the character in the round, bring in family and events.

- How does the writing process work for you is it characters then plot, plot then characters?
 
Normally I have a discussion with my publishers and when I started writing these particular books I came up with several ideas, I knew that they wanted a bigger book, and we had decided that I was going to write about a family, that is the type of thing that I love writing about families and the relationships, so that was a core foundation of the book.

 Then I came up with different family things and where I was going to set it and we decided on Macclesfield so I could use a lot of things that I already knew and it allowed me to write about fabric, which I love.  But where I have a basic ball park idea I like to let the book happen I just sit down and start writing in, and when I start to write a book it’s like I’m telling myself the story as I put in a lot of background in the early chapters.

 But that can be quite boring of the reader so I tend to print those early chapters off and start a bit further into the book and then I feed the back story in. There are two questions that you ask yourself as a writer and one of them is but why? The question that takes the book forward is what if? What if x y or z happened? How would those characters react?

It doesn’t matter what the question is it allows you to play around with the characters and set the flow for them and the directions that you might take. But for every 'what if', in the first book the hero is homosexual and she knows this so the question is why would she marry someone who is homosexual? So you have to have the back-story, so 'what if' takes you forward into the story and 'but why' takes you back.

Once I have got the core story and begin to write I tend to go into back-story mode relaying to the reader why the characters are going to behave in a way that they are, some people tend to have a character and they write a story around the character where as I tend to have a story and I create a character that will allow that to take place.

With four heroines, which I have in this book, I have already established them as children in the previous book so then I had to stick with the characters that I had created for them.  But there has to be some basis in reality of how the character is going to behave and that has to lie within their personalities and things that have happened to them when they were younger.

I often do change a character but in order for them to change there has to be a real life changing event, external event, taking place that allows them to change. And that’s how I move forward as I try to build on the characters that I have already established and to write events happening to them in the story that focus on and reaffirm that personality.

- What do you get out of writing on a personal level?

Oh I just love! I’m quite shy and an unadventurous person so it allows me to try on different hats and different clothes and think what if, because it’s quite safe in the context of the book. A lot of my personality must show through because I really hate putting my heroines in dangerous situations, I really really really hate it, I suppose I don’t expose them to enough danger and that’s my personality and it’s quite a battle to keep that back.

I get a lot out of it for me because it allows you to put things right, in life you can’t always put things right or mend things but in a book you can, maybe I’m just someone who likes interfering in people’s lives I could have been an agony aunt.

I like the sense of satisfaction for understanding where they are coming from an enabling them to, I don’t just put it right for them I make them work for it, I give them the tools to understand for themselves hwy things aren’t working out and then to overcome that.

But I like the whole and it’s a wonderful feeling when the character that you have created inside your head is actually becoming realistic to you and arguing with you and telling you the dialogue, it doesn’t always work and sometimes it falls flat, but I like the whole creative process. I also like the jigsaw puzzle of finding real historical facts and then finding a place to use them in the book and make it work.

- I also read that you mentor new writers?

I used to I don’t so much now, I’m widowed and when I was first widowed I had more time on my hands. And I had moved and I thought that the best way to get to know people was to set up a little writers group, which I did. 

One of the girls which I mentored now writes for Mills and Boon and some of the other moved onto other groups but they had all grown beyond what I could teach, they were all excellent.  I felt that I had helped them to toddle if you like and it was time for them to move on.

Mentoring is quite intensive and you are thinking about then, and I was, and when I took on the contract of Harper Collins and then Avon I knew that I couldn’t do justice for both I knew I would have to teach, and I‘m not qualified to teach at university or college level so I would have to go and acquire qualifications, or give that up and focus on the writing. I decided to focus on the writing because I could never give that up. 

- And for anyone who wants to write have you any advice?

First of all to know the kind of book that you want to write, and if they are keen reader then they will already know that, then to join a local writers group, even if everyone is writing different stuff you will still get masses of support.

And for those who feel that they don’t need that Harper Collins have a website called Autonomy and that’s for people to publish their writing online and other writers read it and they all judge one another so that’s quite helpful. The internet offers a lot of tools for people to engage with their writing and take it forward.

Very few publishers will now take on an author without an agent, and getting an agent is almost as difficult as getting a publisher. It’s bad times for the publishing industry at the moment there aren’t the opportunities that there were because so many people want to write.

A lot of it is knowing what you want to write don’t try and write something that don’t really like yourself because even if you are successful with that first book publishers want to have authors stick to a specific genre and produce a series of books.  So even if you got the first book published f you didn’t like writing it you are going to struggle writing more and more of the same thing or similar so find a genre that you really really like.
  
- Finally what’s next for you?

Probably more of the same I would like to continue with Avon and those types of books, almost like a beach read with the big heroine, I shall continue with the Harper Collins and the world war two sagas and expanding those.

The sagas and the Sins type books fit well together because often the research that I do for one can throw up something that can inspire the research for the other.

 So it’s more of the same for me only better I would prefer to be someone who writes and has good sales rather than a one hit wonder, although you may make a lot of money you may not continue to be published, whereas I love the actual act of writing and for a writer there‘s nothing better than being published and seeing that people and to read what you have written.

Sins by Penny Jordan is out now, published by Avon £6.99

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

Penny Jordan is an author who has been having her work published for thirty years working for Mills and Boon and Harper Collins.

I caught up with her to talk about her new book Sins, her writing career and what lies ahead for her.

- Your new novel is called Sins so can you tell me a little bit about it?

It's a second book in a trilogy about a family that begins in Macclesfield, the first book starts in Macclesfield in the late twenties early thirties and the family own a silk mill. I lived in Macclesfield for twenty years and silk mills are part of the history of the area and I had the idea to write the books because I love fabric and could use some of my local knowledge on the subject.

The first book follows the patriarch of the family and the second book is about her daughter, two step daughters and her nice; and the sins refers to the sins of the past, some of which are secrets in the family that cause problems for the characters in the ongoing book.

I set this book in the late 1950's all the way to the seventies so I start off with them as four young women in London just before the swinging sixties and then into the seventies when they are married women and mothers.

It's about their lives and their problems and how the past has affected their present and their future and how things that have gone wrong and happened in the past have effected their childhood and putting in place certain beliefs and jealousies which cause a lot of trouble between them.

They each feel that they are not getting the parental love that they want and that has had an effect of then as women and how they react to other people. So the story of the book is really about unravelling the tangles of the past allowing then to move on with their lives.

- You have been having novels published for thirty years so how did you get into writing?

I have been writing for thirty years; I write for Mills and Boon, the short romances, and I write for Harper Collins with world war two sagas and now I’m going back to what I wanted to write about when I first started out.

What I like writing about are people’s relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life  and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are,  I do like a happy ending so my books have to have a happy ending.

 - How did you get into writing in the first place?

Well as a child I had always had a good imagination and made stuff up inside my head but I never thought of having a career in writing, I went to the grammar school only got three O Levels, trained as a secretary and had a job as a secretary. I was always a keen reader, I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing, I thought that writers were like demi-gods I don’t know what I thought.

But as I got into my twenties I started to want to write more, if I had read a book and enjoyed it I was carrying on the story inside my head.  Then I read somewhere that the Romantic Novelist Association were holding a competition for new writers and my husband said ’why don’t you go in for that? So I wrote a regency romance, because I like regency romances, and it didn’t win but I got semi-picked up by an agent and I wrote for a little while for him.

That taught me a lot about writing, because obviously I had had not formal training, and it helped to work out how you go about things, although I still think that I have a lot to learn, then I read that Mills and Boon were looking for new writers as they wanted to expand.

So I did one of those and they took me on so a lot of it was being in the right place at the right time, you can be a wonderful writer and not get the chances and be an ok writer and build on those.

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