This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
Having been a journalist for over a decade, writing a book was something I’d always wanted to do. But it wasn’t until I got married in 2004 that I actually got going and seriously started writing one. I began Daddy’s Girls on my honeymoon, when I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read at the airport bookshop. Instead I bought a biography of the Mitford Sisters and as I started reading it in my hammock – I thought this is a great premise for a novel. A story about a group of glamorous, but controversial sisters – but set in the present day.
I sketched out some ideas and started writing when I got back to England. I wasn’t due back at work for another two weeks and that window of time came me an opportunity to just sit and get words down on the page. The story came alive in my head and I think that gave me the discipline to sit down and work on it three or four times a week, even though I had a full-time job.
When I’d done 40,000 words I sent it off to three agents (I didn’t know the etiquette of sending it one at a time. I just wanted it out there!). I never heard back from one agent, and two were interested in representing me.
Once I had an agent it all felt real. It’s tough to write a novel when you have no idea if it’s ever going to see the light of day. Lots of people told me how difficult it was to get a book deal, and once my work colleague, Polly Williams, got an agent and a deal, I remember thinking ‘well there’s no chance it’s going to happen to both of us’. But my husband was really supportive and encouraging – I do think you need a cheerleader! And when I found out I was pregnant, I was even more incentivized to finish it because I knew once baby arrived I’d be lost in a sleepless nights and nappy fog!
My agent was happy to submit the book once I had given her 65,000 polished words. She had one publisher specifically in mind. She knew he was a big fan of big, glossy blockbusters and thought the time was right for the genre to be reinvented. My agent kept me slightly in the dark about the process – she didn’t want to get my hopes up too high, because the sort of book I was writing wasn’t chick-lit in the strictest sense – and in 2005 chick-lit books were the ones that were selling – and consequently getting bought by publishers.By September 2005 I was seven months pregnant and writing most nights. And all the time the story was getting longer and longer and longer! And then I got a call from my agent. I was at work and she asked me if I was sitting down. I had to sneak into a meeting room to take the call and I nearly fell over when she told me that the editor who was interested in the book had made a preempted six-figure deal off the back of the partial manuscript he had been sent. Now came the strategy. Did we accept the preempt or put it out to auction. If one editor had offered such a good deal, we knew there could be other interested parties. But it was an easy decision to make. I have never really been motivated by money (I left a well-paid job as a lawyer to become a magazine journalist because that had always been my dream job). I knew that the editor at HarperCollins really, really believed in the book and was determined to make it a success. So we accepted, and I called up my parents to tell them. It was my dad’s birthday so he was particularly thrilled. All I had to do now was finish the novel. I knew what date I was going into hospital because I’d had a difficult pregnancy and was being induced. It was literally a race to the finish and the night before I was admitted to hospital, I stayed up to finish the book and typed The End just before midnight. You could say 2005 was the year I gave birth twice – to Daddy’s Girls and to my wonderful son Fin.
Tasmina's latest novel, Deep Blue Sea, is out now.