Colleen Hoover has published dozens of novels and can draft one at a startling pace. The secret isn't a rigid daily grind. It's short, intense bursts of writing paired with heavy editing done on the fly.

The Direct Answer
She binge-writes in intense bursts and edits as she goes, drafting in 5,000-word chunks.
She caps herself at about one to one and a half books a year, which she's called as fast as she can go without hurting the book or her mental health.

The Binge-Writing Method

Hoover's speed comes from concentration, not routine. Instead of a steady word count every morning, she stacks the work into marathons. Elle reported that she can go months without writing, then sit down for a few weeks and write 16 hours a day. When a story grabs her, she rides it hard until it's out of her system.

That all-or-nothing approach only works because she doesn't force it. She's said she can go months blocked without panicking, so when the momentum finally shows up, she has the energy to sprint. The slow stretches fund the fast ones. She writes in chunks of roughly 5,000 words at a time, and here's the twist: she won't move on until each chunk is exactly right.

I usually write in chunks, so I'll write about 5,000 words and then the next day I find it impossible to move on until those first 5,000 words are exactly how I want them.

Colleen Hoover, indieBRAG interview

Editing While She Writes

Most fast drafters produce a rough first pass and clean it up later. Hoover flips that. She's said she does a ton of editing while she writes, so by the time she reaches the end, the manuscript is already close to finished. Her final read-through is simple, she's noted, because the heavy lifting happened along the way.

The result is a draft that needs surprisingly little rescue at the finish. Because she's shaping sentences in real time instead of racing to a word-count target, the version she reaches on the last page is already most of the way to publishable. That's the quiet reason the speed doesn't wreck the quality. She isn't writing fast and fixing later. She's writing fast and finishing as she goes.

She also keeps trusted readers in the loop mid-draft. Her mother and best friend read scenes as she completes them, which means she's polishing each section rather than dumping raw pages on anyone. That habit keeps the quality up even when the pace is high. Speed has a ceiling she respects too: one book a year, maybe one and a half, is the fastest she'll go without compromising the work or her own well-being.

Her rise tracks that output. She self-published her debut, Slammed, in 2012 while working as a social worker, and years later BookTok turned her backlist into a phenomenon. The sheer volume of books she'd already written gave readers a mountain to binge all at once, which fed the frenzy further.

The math adds up over time. Working in concentrated waves, she'd built a catalog deep enough that a single viral moment could send readers racing through a dozen titles back to back. Fast drafting didn't just make individual books quicker. It stocked the shelf that BookTok later emptied.

See the full Colleen Hoover writing routine for the complete picture.

What You Can Steal