Confessions of a secret Mills & Boon junkie

I am a Mills & Boon junkie in the making. It is inside me and I fear it – the urge to retreat into a dreamscape of thighs and kisses and happy endings, and never come back. I am very close to being one of those women who have 408 Mills & Boons under the bed. I am on the brink.

Not that I read them constantly. Sometimes I go for six months without even touching one. But inevitably, when I am loveless or annoyed, I think – yes, I can have a Mills & Boon. I can have virtual sex with a non-existent man who is made of paper. So I retreat to my bed with The Venetian's Moonlight Mistress and live in a perfectly etched fantasy world where I get everything I want. Passion. Palaces. Punctuation. Then I feel sick and get up, and don't tell anyone what I have done.

Why do I feel shame? Romantic fiction is the biggest publishing sector in the world. It outsells true crime, and science fiction and God. It has much to tell us about women's internal lives. But still it feels taboo, in a way that reading about Klingons blowing up spacecraft does not. So I decide to try to write a Mills & Boon novel. I want to know if, behind the awful titles – The Surgeon She's Been Waiting For, Doorstep Daddy – there are any insights. I want expiation.

A few weeks later, I am walking down Paradise Road, in Richmond, London, looking for the Mills & Boon office. I imagine I am going to arrive at the Disney castle or at least a building studded with neon hearts. But when I arrive I find an ordinary office block with tinted windows.

Inside it is like any other open-plan office, except there are piles of paperbacks everywhere. The staff is almost entirely female and young. I am asked to sit in the boardroom, under a portrait of Charles Boon, who co-founded the company 101 years ago. The Canadian publishing house Harlequin ate Mills & Boon in 1971, but Charles Boon is still watching from his frame. I am waiting to be told the secret Mills & Boon formula.

Clare Somerville, the marketing director, walks in. She is blonde and warm. "Our books appeal to average women," she says. "They are exhausted looking after everybody. The hero is a nurturer who lets you be yourself, while someone off stage does all the crappy stuff. I get very cross when people say we denigrate women. I think we are one of the most feminist publishers in existence." How so? "We don't trailblaze but we do talk to women about their emotions and their feelings and their dreams. We talk about relationships in the way that women really want them to be."

Then Somerville smashes my preconceptions. Preconception One – in a Mills & Boon novel you get an overpowering hero riding up on a white horse and saving the heroine. This, Somerville explains, is not true. They used to publish books like that, but no more. They've moved on. "The Mills & Boon heroine," she says, "has changed from a cipher that is in every way inferior to the man to being the dominant force in the relationship." Nowadays, she explains, the woman is in control. The heroines used to have terrible jobs but today you find them running companies. The woman doesn't leave her job to marry the man. She keeps her job and marries.

Baby of shame

Mills & Boon Preconception Two – the heroines are always beautiful virgins. "Virgin is still popular," says Somerville, "But she could be divorced. She could have a child out of wedlock. The heroine is quite often voluptuous [she means fat] or a bit plain." She tells me about a book where a waitress and a foreign prince have sex on a table. The heroine hates her bottom – she thinks it's too big – but he is overwhelmed by it. "Quite often a woman is made to recognise her own beauty through a fulfilling relationship with a man," she says.

Mills & Boon Preconception Three – nothing really terrible can ever happen to the heroine. Again, wrong. "There is divorce," says Somerville, "bankruptcy, bereavement and they have been left destitute. Baby of Shame is quite common." What is Baby of Shame? "A baby that is a secret baby that the male protagonist doesn't know about." She sighs. "There are many obstacles in the voyage to happiness."

The more I listen, the more I realise that every possible combination of romantic stories is for sale here. If you want to read about a gynaecologist who has lost his arms, there will be a book. If you want to read about a typist who has lost her legs, there will be a book. They publish 720 novels a year.

Some things in Mills & Boon land are eternal. The hero will always be attractive. He will always have a basic integrity because he has to be a man the reader can love. He is always difficult initially but there is always a reason why he is difficult. But, prodded by the heroine, who cannot smoke or admit to multiple lovers, he will be redeemed. And so she is empowered. She is a saviour.

I still keep expecting to be given the formula. Where is it? But the staff at Mills & Boon say the best Mills & Boon writers are the ones who tweak the conventions and come up with something new. "Stay away from cliches," they say. "Believable is the key. The scenarios can be outrageous. But they must be characters the readers can believe in."

My hero is a prat

Then I have a mad conversation with some women from the editorial department. First I say I want a war correspondent hero who doesn't trust women because the girl he loved was blown up in Sierra Leone. They blink politely. Then I say I want a billionaire newspaper proprietor who my journalist heroine falls in love with but they can't be together because he votes Conservative and she votes Labour. More blinks. Then I want to set something in rehab. I want to call it They Met in Rehab or Love Reunited. "Well," says one, "if that story gives us a good love story, fine, but we don't want rehab for rehab's sake."

I feel they are knocking my ideas down. They take this incredibly seriously. They say things like "Mediterranean hero equals passion" and "Billionaire sells" in the same tone you would say, "Your father is dead." They are not really selling romance, I decide. They are selling dried goods. There is nothing romantic or fantastical about the Mills & Boon office. In fact, the managing director, Guy Hallowes, is leaving soon, to be replaced by Jane Ferguson, the woman who runs Ryvita. Which kind of makes sense to me because you don't really read Mills & Boon books. You eat them.

I walk out of the office and ignore everything they have told me. I don't read 50 current books. I read three. I read them critically, as if I were reading Mills & Boon for the first time. And I realise I hate the characters. I have a brief fantasy about writing a book in which a Mills & Boon heroine escapes from her novel, and ends up dying in a crack den. I call it Abducted by Reality.

The men are appalling. They are always saying things like, "You are a stupid little fool!" And I end up thinking women who read these books – including me – are incredibly stupid.

So I decide to talk to some. I go to a Mills & Boon fan page and ask fans to call me. One of them says she has five university degrees. "I quite like the idea of curling up to a Viking," she says. "but in real life he would be untidy." Another says, "When you are reading the novel you are the heroine. You escape to another place and another world." She describes her life to me – she is single and a full-time carer for her disabled son. "I love it when the women stand up to the heroes, even if they have money," she says.

I am now a little chastened. So I sit down to write. But I find I can't do the sample chapter and synopsis. I know I am supposed to write about a believable heroine falling in love with a believable hero and having a believable happy ending. This is what the experts have told me; this is what the readers expect. But, to my surprise, I simply cannot do it. I can't even begin to write a woman I like enough to give a lover to. Begin with myself, you say? How? There is nothing heroic about me. I am bilious and I smoke. I suddenly become convinced that I am too cynical to write this proposal properly and, in the pantheon of Mills & Boon readers, I am not quite sure where this leaves me. Ready to become a 60-book-a-month girl? Or does this self-loathing in itself make me a Mills & Boon heroine? A woman who does not believe herself loveable enough to write a hero for? Nah. Pass the axe.

So I borrow a pair of cliches and swim into pastiche. I write a prim, virginal heroine. Her name is Lucy and she grew up in a mining town. Her chain-smoking mother worked nights at a toy factory to send her to private school.

"I'm right proud of you, girl, and no mistake," said her mother, sucking on one of the Silk Cut Ultras that would eventually kill her.

Lucy works for the Guardian, where she dreams of being taken off the dressing-up-as-a-fairy-for-Glastonbury rota, "and given a shot at a real story!" She is partly the opposite of me and partly the woman I wish I were. Either way, I hate her.

And my hero is just a prat. He is called Darcy and he is a billionaire media tycoon. He hates women because his mother died of a diabetic fit, when he was supposed to be looking after her. But he went out riding instead.

Once I have Lucy and Darcy, I begin to write a ridiculously hackneyed plot in which my cliches get on and off aeroplanes and my cliches have sex and my cliches cry and my cliches get drunk and roll about on the floor, moaning and saying things like, "I always believed in you." I sit there cackling at them and changing their eye colours every other paragraph. When I run out of eye colours I stick in all this sub-Bette Davis dialogue and when I run out of sub-Bette things to say I just write, "How dare you?" That, in my mind, is a possible title. How Dare You?

Protecting the slush pile

I am pleased with myself when I have finished. I am particularly pleased that at the end Darcy buys Lucy the Guardian and she installs herself as editor, with a pro-shoes agenda. I send it in to Mills & Boon and they email me to say they love it. I cannot believe this. Mills & Boon makes millions selling women fantasies and I can't believe that my pitch would convince anybody. It didn't convince me.  I decide they said they loved it because I am a journalist. Because the most important thing in the Mills & Boon office is the slush pile. All Mills & Boon writers were formerly Mills & Boon readers. They get 4,000 submissions a year – and 10 will make it. The slush pile has to be protected.

I need a second opinion for my manuscript. So I send it to Michelle Styles, the author of Taken By the Viking and Sold and Seduced. Michelle is revered in romance fiction circles for her blunt advice. The next day, I telephone her. She speaks in a low American accent; she sounds hesitant. Bad news? "If you had sent it in to Mills & Boon normally, it would have been rejected," she says. Why? "You decided not to respect the reader," she says. "It's easily done." So they didn't tell me the truth at Mills & Boon? "They don't," she says. "They are nice. Or they don't tell you in a way you can understand."

Not losing the plot

She has a list of defects that throws my sad little manuscript into the Mills & Boon grave. "You want the reader to fall in love with him. I don't think you even like him. How can the reader fall in love with him if you don't? Your heroine is too damaged. She went to Cambridge and never had a boyfriend?"

Ah. This is called The Heroine Problem. It is much harder to write the heroine than the hero, apparently, because she has to be bland enough not to offend millions of readers and interesting enough not to offend millions of readers. Mills & Boon heroines are like madams in brothels. They essentially have to facilitate a sexual encounter between two other people – the reader, and the hero. They are the third person in the romance. And my heroine is mental.

Anything else? "The plot is too contrived," says Michelle. "You seem to have written a plot and then tried to shoehorn your characters into it. She ends up with a Nobel prize for literature? What has that to do with how she has grown as a person? You need to assume the reader is intelligent. Readers buy these books when they are waiting for chemotherapy or are housebound, or finding out their husband has left. You have to respect them."

Everyone said it would be so easy to write a Mills & Boon. Well, actually, it is incredibly difficult. I couldn't do it.

If only this article were a Mills & Boon book. If it were, not only would I have written the entire novel beautifully, I would have ended up a better person for it. And then – then! - Rupert Murdoch – but young again and kind! - would descend from Olympus, and claim me as his bride. Mills & Boon – you broke me.