This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
We’re really pleased to have Donna Douglas here today sharing her experience of getting a book deal.
‘Have you ever thought about writing a historical novel?’ my
agent asked me.
Well, yes, I’d thought about it. I’d also thought about learning Mandarin and signing up to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for charity, but I’d dismissed all those ideas as Too Hard. Never mind that my bedside reading consisted entirely of history; as far as I was concerned, only grown-up authors wrote historical novels. They were too difficult, needed lots of research. I wouldn’t know where to start. I was far better sticking to contemporary romance, thank you very much.
‘Shame,’ my agent sighed. ‘I know an editor who’s looking for a series of novels set in a hospital, sometime in the last century.’
Hang on a minute. So now not only was she expecting me to write a historical novel, she was also expecting me to write about doctors and nurses? My head was already spinning at the idea. My medical knowledge was limited to watching Embarrassing Bodies and researching my latest worrying symptoms on NetDoctor. Boy, had she got the wrong person.
‘But I’m not a nurse!’ I told anyone who would listen.
‘JK Rowling wasn’t a wizard, but that didn’t stop her,’ my daughter replied.
This was true. And my background as a journalist did mean I knew where to start looking for information. So, still convinced I wasn’t nearly grown-up enough, I agreed to give it a go.
But when I started my research in the Royal College of Nursing archives, a strange thing happened. I became completely hooked. Those first hand accounts of nurses’ lives back in the 1930s seemed to jump off the page at me. Almost immediately, I had a vivid picture of three young women from very different backgrounds, turning up at the gates of an East End hospital to begin their training. From then on, the ideas tumbled on to the page, until before I knew it I’d put together the first three chapters and a synopsis of The Nightingale Girls.
Even then, I wasn’t sure I’d got it right. I’d enjoyed writing it far too much for it to be a historical novel. When my agent said we were to meet with the editor to discuss the project, I prepared myself for a very kind ‘Stick to what you know, love.’ Even when we sat down and I noticed the words ‘Terrific – loved it’ pencilled over my manuscript, I thought I must have misread it. It wasn’t until we were on the tube heading back from the meeting and my agent said, ‘You know they’re going to buy it, don’t you?’ that it sank in. And even then I had to make her repeat it all the way from Victoria to King’s Cross.
So now I’m a grown-up historical novelist. Sort of. All I can say now is, Mount Kilimanjaro, here I come…