Dee Williams talked about her twenty years of being published.  She’s had 20 books published in 20 years and has been with Headline for that time.  Dee is the epitome of someone who can do it if you really want it.  She can’t spell, and said that the response to her cards home during the war was ‘your spelling is atrocious’.  So when she got her first Amstrad word processor with spell checker, she thought she’d died and gone to heaven. 

She met her husband at sixteen, was engaged at 18 and married at 20 then moved to Spain. It was whilst living in Spain that Dee started writing, and showed the first three chapters of a novel to her writing group. But it wasn’t until they returned to England in 1989 and she met Sue Fletcher of the RNA, and Sue mentioned a publisher looking for sagas that Dee’s writing took off.  She sent the three chapters to the publisher (hard copy).  A year later it was finally accepted after three rewrites and Dee got a contract, but worried she couldn’t write another book, didn’t want to sign it.  She found though that she could write another one and the rest is history.

Dee doesn’t plot and does a lot of research, travelling all over the country and writing to various people.  For instance, she wrote to St Christopher’s Hospice asking if their soldiers during the war at Christmas wore party hats, and she received two magazines with the covers showing…soldiers wearing party hats.  So never be afraid to ask for help.

She keeps records of her characters in a book with the date of start, names, to or from Rotherhithe, characters details. She has the first chapter in pencil.  She ensures that all her characters grow up together.
Once she’s half way through one book, then she thinks about the next one.  And when one book is finished, that’s when her desk is cleaned.

Dee then went through all the changes in publishing over the twenty years, which include: PLR rates, audio tapes to CDs, editor input, mega sales, own promotion (Freda Lightfoot, who introduced Dee, said that when she was first published and mentioned doing her own promotion, her publisher was amazed).

Dee has loosely based her characters on relatives for inspiration.  Her first book was loosely about her grandmother and Polly was an aunt, and one of her characters was a stevedore, which her father was.  She is now writing about her own background and is writing about children being evacuated during the war.

Then she answered questions from how many editors she’s had (four), what editor/author relationships she’s had (one couldn’t get on with, the others have been fine), to what makes a saga (to read the answer see the website for list).  She’s never wanted to break out from writing sagas, and said that some of her covers have been okay and some not.

Written by Julie Day