WHEN the feedback came it was swift. “Rhiannon (the central character) is not yet heroine material,” said the reviewer. “She has an irritating tendency to burst into tears on almost any stressful occasion, which made me want to slap her, hard. I think you should keep her inexperienced and innocent, but make her feisty and determined, too.”

It wasn’t just the characterisation that came in for criticism. “The story as a whole needs more storm and stress, more real emotion and feeling. Pace is very important; I don’t think your own is varied enough.”

When Brenda Squires, a psychotherapist who gave up her practice last year to write full time, got her manuscript back from the reviewers, it wasn’t what she was hoping for. Squires, who is in her fifties, was one of around 200 authors who paid £50 to have their manuscripts assessed by the Romantic Novelists Association (RNA) as part of its New Writers Scheme. Drafts are read on an anonymous basis by a team of 30 mostly experienced authors who provide feedback to help bring the work up to a publishable standard. Books that are good enough to get a second reading are passed on to agents and publishers, and each year one entry receives the RNA’s New Writers Award for unpublished authors.

“At first their comments niggled me,” she says, “but when I worked through them one by one, asking myself ‘Do I agree or don’t I?’, I found that, almost invariably, I did agree.” The rewrites paid off. She won this year’s award, just before the RNA’s recent annual conference, for her book Landsker set in London during the Great Strike of the 1920s, and has two more novels in the pipeline.

Founded in 1960, the RNA is the UK’s only professional organisation for those who write romantic fiction, a sprawling genre that is estimated to account for 12 per cent of the total number of fiction titles published in the UK each year. Its 700 members range from the tremendously successful, such as Joanna Trollope and Katie Fforde, to the as-yet-unpublished, for whom the annual conference is an opportunity to meet colleagues and develop their craft.

Held over three days at Leicester University, the gathering drew around 250 novelists (including a handful of men), and featured a range of workshops on topics from how to write a synopsis, market yourself and find an agent through to the aspects of the writing process such as characterisation, plot development and, of course, love scenes.

The last part, entitled Sexy Bits, was entrusted to Julie Cohen, the head of English at St Mary’s School, Ascot, who was wearing a chic cream top emblazoned with a pair of red lips. She gave everyone in the audience a small packet of chocolate that they were told not to open. “These are to remain on the armrests next to you,” she said. “They represent sexual tension.” Next came strawberries. We were told to eat them, then write about them. “I want you to describe the sensation of eating them. Engage all your senses, not just the most obvious ones.

“What is the smell like, how does it feel on the tongue, what is the texture like? At the same time, pay attention to what else is going on in the room. Outside noise can add a real intensity to the writing — as well as drama, if the protagonists are likely to be interrupted. Remember that sex takes place in the mind as well as the body, what you are thinking is just as important as what you are feeling.

“Try to put characters and situations together in unusual combinations — it’s much sexier to take your knickers off in a supermarket than in a bedroom.”

We wrote in secret, but were then asked to read our efforts aloud to our neighbours. “I shall never see you in the same light again,” whispered someone to my left.

One of the RNA’s aims is to see the romantic novel treated with more respect. “Of course the jokes about romantic novelists irritate me, but I am not writing to get respect,” says Jenny Haddon, who writes for Mills & Boon as Sophie Weston. “Romantic fiction contains a lot of emotional intelligence, with a naked honesty that is antithetical to a lot of intellectual games. Emotional yearnings are frequently painful so dealing with them at gut level, and talking about how people feel, is a very powerful thing to do.”

Catherine Jones, a former Army officer published by Piatkus Books and Severn House, agrees: “It’s unfair that romantic films attract huge budgets and wide enjoyment, but the books on which they are based are dismissed as fluffy.”

“Runaway Bride was a shameless reworking of Pretty Woman and no one seemed to notice, yet romantic books are quite wrongly dismissed as being identical,” adds Kate Walker, a Mills & Boon author.