Colleen Hoover wrote her first novel on a borrowed laptop in a mobile home in East Texas while her son was at play practice. She was a social worker at the time, her husband drove long-haul trucks, and the story she was writing was meant to be a Christmas gift for her mother, who had just gotten a Kindle and wanted something to read. There was no plan beyond that. No agent, no query letter, no word-count tracker. She self-published Slammed in January 2012, made thirty dollars in her first month, and paid the water bill with it. Eight months later, the book hit the New York Times bestseller list. By 2022, she was selling 8.6 million print copies in a single year.
The routine behind all of that is worth understanding, because it reads like the anti-advice version of every writing craft book ever written. Hoover doesn't write in the morning. She doesn't track word counts. She goes months without writing anything, then locks herself in a hotel room and doesn't come out until a book is finished. The thing that holds the whole approach together is the conviction that writing should never feel like work, and the discipline that lives inside that conviction, protecting it at all costs, is real and specific and learnable.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- No fixed early wake time for writing. Hoover writes in the evenings, typically after family obligations, from around 9 PM to midnight when at home.
- Writing Location
- At home, usually on a couch or at a laptop in a domestic space. For intensive sessions, she checks into a hotel alone for a week or two at a time and writes until the book is done.
- Daily Output
- She doesn't set daily word count goals. Her pattern is long stretches of nothing followed by weeks of writing up to sixteen hours a day. She writes in chunks of roughly 5,000 words, then spends the next session editing those before pushing forward.
- Tools
- Laptop. No legal pads or longhand. She needs complete silence to write, removing batteries from clocks if necessary. Music gets her into the mood beforehand but stops when the actual writing starts.
- Famous Ritual
- New socks. Before any long writing day or hotel sprint, she puts on a brand-new pair of socks. She buys multiple packs before locking herself away to write. "I have it in my head that fresh, new socks make me a better writer," she said in a Goodreads Q&A.
- Books Written This Way
- Slammed, It Ends with Us, Verity, November 9, Ugly Love, Confess, and more than twenty others.
The Borrowed Laptop
The origin story matters more than most people realize. In 2011, Hoover was working for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children in East Texas, a federal aid program. She and her husband lived in a mobile home with their three sons. She typed out the first draft of Slammed chapter by chapter on a laptop she'd borrowed, often writing while her youngest son was at play practice and she had a spare hour. The book was written in conditions that would qualify most writers for a full exemption from the obligation to produce anything.
What's interesting is that she says she didn't experience those circumstances as obstacles in the first place. She's said in multiple interviews that she wrote Slammed because she wanted to write it, full stop. The intended audience was her mother. There was no imagined reading public, no market calculation, no career anxiety threading through the prose. A woman with a borrowed laptop wrote the story she wanted to write, for one reader she loved, in the gaps between a full-time job and three children. That specific freedom, writing without anyone watching, produced something clean and emotionally direct. You can feel that in her early books. There's no posturing in them.
After she self-published in January 2012, a single five-star review from book blogger Maryse Black changed everything. Sales spiked. Within months, Slammed and its sequel Point of Retreat were both on the New York Times list. A traditional publisher came calling. The borrowed laptop chapter of her career was over, but the sensibility it produced stayed in the work.
Evening Hours and Hotel Sprints
Once the writing became her actual career, Hoover had to figure out a practice that fit her real life. She has three sons, a husband, and a home in Texas, and mornings in that life belong to other people. So the writing moved to the evenings. When she's at home and a project is moving, she settles in after the family is done with the day, usually around nine, and works until midnight or later. The house is quiet by then. No one needs anything from her. Those evening hours have a similar logic to Morrison's 4 AM setup, just run twelve hours later.
The other mode is the hotel sprint. Hoover has described checking into a hotel alone, buying several packs of socks, and staying until a draft is finished. No interruptions, no domestic logistics, no context-switching. She orders food in, keeps the room dark, and writes. This is what she does when she needs to finish something, when the normal evening pace isn't fast enough or focused enough. The hotel room is a pressure chamber. It's also, in its own way, the room of one's own that Virginia Woolf argued every writer needs, just rented by the week rather than maintained year-round.
What strikes me about this two-mode setup is how honest it is about the nature of creative work. Some books come out in a steady trickle of evening hours. Others need a contained, total immersion to get to the end. Most writers pretend there's one mode and then wonder why half their projects stall. Hoover just uses both, depending on the book.
The No-Formula Formula
Hoover's stated approach to process is, essentially, that she doesn't have one. She's said in interviews: "My only formula is to not follow a formula. Every single book is a completely different writing experience." She's written books with no outline at all, discovering the story sentence by sentence. She's also posted a rough outline on her wall and worked from it. Ugly Love was written out of sequence, with most of Miles's chapters drafted first and Tate's chapters filled in afterward. The process shifts to fit the book rather than the other way around.
She also doesn't set word count goals or deadlines for herself. She goes months without writing a word. Then she gets motivated and writes two books in a row. This sounds chaotic, but I think it's actually a sophisticated position. What she's protecting is the emotional engine behind the work. Her rule is that writing should never feel like a job, and the moment it starts feeling like one, the work degrades. Forcing output when the motivation isn't there produces pages she'll have to throw away. Waiting until the compulsion returns produces pages she keeps.
The edit-as-you-go method is worth noting too. She writes roughly 5,000 words, then spends the next session refining those before moving on. Some writers would call this a trap, arguing that editing during drafting slows the forward momentum. For Hoover it seems to function as a warm-up, a way of re-entering the story's world before pushing it further. The chapter she finished yesterday becomes the on-ramp to the chapter she's writing today.