The Real Life Of A Romance Writer

It’s a dream many have… to be a successful novelist. But what is life really like for a published author, and a best-selling one at that? Kiwi writer Nicky Pellegrino reveals the reality behind the fiction.

- Nicky Pellegrino

Being a novelist, it’s a mad whirl of glittering launch parties and research trips to far-flung places. Okay, I’m lying. I’ve been writing fiction for at least 15 years now and I can tell you what it mostly involves is sitting alone in a room, moving only your fingers, as you try to translate the ideas in your head into words and get them down on the page.

There is hour upon hour, day upon day of it. Sometimes it goes well, but not always. No one else can help much and you’re plagued with self-doubt. My latest novel, A Dream of Italy, is my 11th but I still embark on each new project filled with fears that I’m not good enough and won’t be able to do it.

What made things trickier this time was that I was determined not to knit any bits and pieces of myself into the characters. Everyone in this book is entirely unlike me – a gay couple, a pair of struggling millennials, a woman who has lost her way in life, an old man with a secret – and lots of time was spent getting to know them.

When the writing is going well, the characters start to seem real, almost like friends whose lives I’m becoming over-involved in. They can be infuriating, difficult to understand and at times they take me by surprise and lead me to places I hadn’t intended the story to go. It is a very intense relationship – me and these people I have invented – and at the end of the process I struggle to say goodbye to them. Often it seems as if they may still be out there, carrying on with their lives beyond the confines of the pages.