Happily Ever After

In 1998, Margo Wider, RN, left nursing to become Margo Maguire, full-time romance novelist. Her career shift has led to six published novels with Harlequin Historicals, three of which will be released this year.

Maguire was working full-time in the ICU of a Detroit trauma center when she first started writing as a hobby. She began with a medical thriller, but stopped after five chapters. "I was scaring myself," she explains. "I had to spend a lot of time thinking about the horrible things that were going to happen in my story, and it started to get to me."

So she quit writing and concentrated on nursing. At the same time, she re-enrolled in college, and began working toward a BA in history. She and her husband then had three children in four years, and her days revolved around feedings, school schedules, and her three weekly shifts at the hospital.

Relaxing with Romance

But the reading and writing bug hadn't been cured. When Maguire got home from her afternoon shifts in the ICU, she needed a way to decompress after a high-stress day. She turned to reading and discovered the novels of some of the biggest names in the romance industry: Kathleen Woodiwiss, LaVyrle Spencer, Judith McNaught. "I started thinking about the historical themes I'd studied in school. I sort of challenged myself to try writing something like their work," she says. And so, in 1994, she began to write. Knowing little about the craft, she used instinct based on what had intrigued her as a reader. "I wrote a 500-plus-page tome called The White Rose, a historical novel set in the late 19th century, just before the Spanish-American War, about a woman doctor from Ann Arbor who travels to Hong Kong to try to find her brother. It's a very romantic story …. Around the same time, I also worked on another book, a medieval romance."

From Reader to Writer

Two chance meetings propelled her further down the path of writing. A patient of hers was the mother-in-law of a nurse who had become a successful romance writer. Then, a professor encouraged her to take a writing course, and the instructor turned out to be the same nurse-turned-writer. These classes were all the encouragement Maguire needed.

In February 1998, she sent out her medieval romance, The Bride of Windermere, to Harlequin. Ten days later, an editor called her with an offer to buy the book – if she could rewrite the untimely demise of one character (who lived to become the hero of a subsequent novel). "I was shocked to learn that other people had to wait months. The call came in February 1998, and my first book came out in March 1999," she says.

She now writes medieval romances for Harlequin Historicals and says she draws inspiration from history, not real people. For example, "When I studied the Wars of the Roses [the 15th century English civil war], I thought about what it would be like to live through that era – when the king was an incompetent madman and cousins warred with cousins for power. Then I add the elements that belong in a story – [a hero or heroine] and an antagonist – and I've got the beginnings of a plot."

Her medical expertise helps her create realistic reads. "There's nothing worse than reading a book in which the characters sustain injuries that are clearly fatal, but then they go on to appear – and thrive – in the next chapter. The injuries I give are realistic with the outcomes."

All's Well that Ends Well

Maguire still maintains her RN credentials, in case she returns to nursing. Writing is a solitary job, and she sometimes misses the camaraderie of a hospital setting. Nursing, and in particular the daily traumas in the ICU, has had a lasting effect on her, and on the path of her writing career. "I chose romance partly because it offered a pleasant escape from the kinds of terrible things I saw in the hospital: gunshot wounds, critical stabbings, a couple of torture victims, auto accident victims, etc. With a romance, I could escape all that horror. I knew that there would be a happy ending, and that all the loose ends would be tied up satisfactorily and everything would be right with the world."

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