Christina Lauren takes us to “Paradise”

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly

Katie O'Connor: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible Editor Katie O'Connor, and I'm beyond excited to be speaking with best friend writing duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings today, known to us by the pen name Christina Lauren. Welcome to you both.

Christina Hobbs: Yay. Thank you so much.

Lauren Billings: Hello.

KO: You two have coauthored more than two dozen novels together. And your latest, The Paradise Problem, takes us to Indonesia and back as our artist heroine, Anna, and her fake husband, Liam, try to convince Liam's family that their marriage is not the sham it in fact is, so that he can inherit his financial share of his family's grocery store empire. What was the originating idea for this story?

CH: The story started as something completely different, which is funny. We always say that, "We don't know how to do something right till we do something wrong." And so we started this story—I'll just make it really short here—about two people who were married, got divorced, and didn't tell anybody, didn't tell their family. But we were going to do it as a holiday book. And we talked to our publisher and they were like, "Well, maybe not holiday.” But once you take that sort of whimsical, crazy circumstance away, it didn't work. Because if two people are divorced and still love each other, that actually becomes sort of sad.

And so we wrote like 30,000 words, got rid of them, wrote 30,000 words, got rid of them, and finally we were just like, "This is not working." And so we renamed the characters, created this whole other thing, and kind of kept that brief idea of still married but fooling everybody. And once we did all of that and figured out who Anna was and all of that, it sort of came together. But it was a real journey.

KO: There is so much courage in hitting that delete button. I commend you for going that route, because what we ended with was just such a fun, wonderful story. How do your story ideas typically originate? Are you guys bouncing ideas off of each other? Is there a spark of inspiration from something that you love and you run with it? What's normally that sort of originating process?

LB: We come up with our ideas in every possible way. Sometimes one of us will have an idea and we build upon it together. Sometimes we have just a little tiny spark. Like The Soulmate Equation, we were both obsessed with the Theranos scandal, and so we kind of wanted to play with the idea of a startup, and it all sort of sprouted from there. But the truth is that everything usually just starts with the kernel of the idea. And it's always fleshed out by the two of us spending time together, outlining it, brainstorming over several days, usually together. We always get together to outline.

KO: That's fun. That must have some great energy, too, to kind of kickstart the process.

LB: Yeah, I mean, she lives in Salt Lake City and I live in Southern California, so we write remotely, but there's a magic that happens when we're in the same room together. And I think that's a little piece of the Christina Lauren recipe, right? Is that the genesis of these ideas and the building of the outline is something that we have to do when we're in the room together. And the writing itself, we can do on our own and talk every day, of course. But, yeah, it's super fun. We have the best time together.

KO: How do your individual writing processes work? When you're in that moment, are you sort of silent workers? Is it similar to each other, different from each other?

CH: It's funny because our process has changed so much from the beginning, and it really does evolve with every book. No book is the same. Like, the book that comes out in May is our 30th published, and the process was completely different. So, in the beginning we used to always outline together and then divide everything up evenly and draft that way. And then as we have gone and our kids have gotten older and our lives have gotten different and we get busier and there's different things, we've really learned to figure out what each other's strengths are. I'm a very slow drafter. Like, I have a lot of ideas, but it takes me a long time to get them on the page looking the way that I see them in my head. Lo is a really great first drafter, but she'll tell you that she wants to write two people in a room just like falling in love and talking and kissing. And that's amazing, but sometimes I'll be like, "But what happens?"

Christina: "We always say that, 'We don't know how to do something right till we do something wrong.'"

And so we have learned that we can do things totally different. Lo fast-drafted this book, and then I came in behind her and filled stuff in. I love direction. So, when she's like, "Christina describes here," I love that. And so we just keep going back and forth and back and forth. And by the end, we've both been in it. But the process, it just changes every time. The one thing we have learned is that we have to stay flexible. It's when we start getting really stiff in our process that we start having problems.

KO: And how do you handle those types of creative differences when they come up? What helps you achieve that flexibility?

LB: So, our problems in any sort of friction or whatever is never a creative one. We didn't know each other before we started writing together really well. So, like, we met in 2009 at San Diego Comic-Con. I was putting on a panel for fan fiction and fan art, and Christina had a very popular fan fiction at the time. So, she came out and we met and we really hit it off. And after three or four days knowing each other, we're like, "Hey, wouldn't it be fun to write a little short story together?" So, we did that, it was really fun, and we ended up deciding to write a book.

And I'm saying this backstory because our relationship as a writing team grew up with our relationship as best friends. All of that kind of went together. Whenever we're working on something for Christina Lauren, there is no Christina in isolation or Lauren in isolation. And so if something I come up with is not the right idea, we just realize that together in conversation and it's not like tense or weird or anything.

But because we are best friends, of course we argue and there is friction about other things. You know, we'll disagree the way you do with your sister or your best friend or your spouse, but our creative strife is not a thing really. We always just talk out the plots. Sometimes we'll write ourselves into a wall and things just aren't reading smoothly or it doesn't feel right, and so then we backtrack and we talk about it, but it's not like, "Oh, my gosh, Lo, I can't believe you had our character do that." You know, there's never any sort of friction about that. It's always very collaborative.

KO: Do you think that collaboration is what makes for a great writing team? In my opinion, you two are the GOATs of writing duo here. Is that the key to that bond?

CH: Oh, yeah, I think so. I think people can tell that we have so much fun together, and it's sort of contagious. But, like, we genuinely respect and love each other and look up to each other. I say my favorite thing about being part of Christina Lauren is I get to read Lo's words first. Like, she's such a beautiful writer, and the fact that I get to do this with her is such a gift. And I just feel like that comes across in this genuine friendship. And people are sometimes surprised to see two women working together so well and they want to be part of that and stuff. So, it really is the places that I sort of fall short, Lo excels in. It really is magic once we get in there together.

LB: And I think the truth is that our personalities have a real good fit. I am really intense. I'm really structured. I like making spreadsheets. I like tracking progress. I like the sort of the data of writing. And Christina doesn't get geeky about that in the same way. She sort of is more, it's about how something feels and the flow of it. And she's much more laid-back in some ways. And so I think we really complement each other. And I think it's just serendipity that our ro—our romance [laughs]—that our relationship and our personalities ended up being so complementary. We just never could have predicted that.

CH: Lo always says that she's neurotic, but if you had two of me, nothing would get done. It would just be like rambling stories and stuff. And so she always says that, but she's the one who keeps this train going. You just could not have two of us.

KO: It's like peanut butter and jelly over there.

CH: That's right.

LB: Yes, yes.

KO: The setting of The Paradise Problem is gorgeous and luxurious and sparked some serious wanderlust on my end. I was curious if any fun research went into the locale?

LB: Yeah, I mean, we always do a lot of research, and by we, I mean Christina, because that is her jam. She is so good at the research and she really loves it. I basically am always like, "No, I just want to start writing right now." So, she kind of does some of that in the background and sends me the information that I need to make it believable. But we found this one place, it's called Bawah, it's a reserve. It's an island in the Indonesian Archipelago and it's this exclusive resort that has these ridiculous bungalows, that kind of walk across this bridge out across the water and then you have these bungalows and there's all this sustainable food. And so we really did model it after that resort. And of course we've been asked like, "Did you guys get to go?" And the answer is, "No … but we want to."

And I do have some friends who are from various places in Indonesia and they were super helpful in reading it and giving feedback about the people and the geography and the climate.

CH: Helping us name our island and that sort of thing.

LB: Yes, one of our readers named our island, so that was fun.

KO: That's really fun. Well, speaking of research, your heroes and heroines usually have very interesting careers. You've brought us a graphic novelist, a geneticist, and with The Paradise Problem, our hero, Liam Weston, he is a professor-slash-tech whiz who could, if he wanted to, have the top job at his family's empire. What type of research goes into creating these backstories? Because they are all intimately tied to the plot.

CH: So, for me, I'm not a scientist. I'm none of these things. And so that's obviously where Lo comes in. I have to really know a lot about a character's job to be able to write how they think. I think that that's how I get into the character, where Lo likes to just get in there and write and sort of see what happens. But that's how I get in their heads.

So, like, in Dirty Rowdy Thing, he's a Canadian fisherman, and I know nothing really about Canadian fishing. But in reading all this stuff, I was able to learn that when he looks out at the weather, he is not just looking at the weather to see what he's going to wear, he's looking at how his day is going to unfold and if he's going to have to bring stuff in, if he's going to have to move away from a storm, all of that sort of stuff. And so in this, especially Anna being an artist, I watched so many YouTube videos on artists describing how they paint things and how they mix the colors and all of that stuff. Because it seems unimportant, but we are really big into confidence porn. So we need enough that you believe that whoever we're writing knows everything about their job and what they're doing. We usually go too far and have to pull it back, but I love a person that you think you can trust them to do anything, whether it's Lily in Something Wilder and taking people out into the desert, or River in Soulmate Equation and science, like, they have got to be the best at what they do.

Christina: "But we are really big into confidence porn. So we need enough that you believe that whoever we're writing knows everything about their job and what they're doing."

LB: Just to add on to that, I think for Liam, he was really burned by his family's business. His dad is a really toxic person. And so for Liam to be a tech whiz, but he kind of transitioned into this cultural anthropology position where he's teaching students about corporate culture and how to build corporate culture, that needed to feel like a normal and a realistic evolution for him as a human, where he was really good at this one thing, but it wasn't making him happy. So I think it was really fun to think about who Liam would want to be and what he would want to do to sort of offset the toxicity of his family's business. Then we also got to make the anthropology/archaeology joke with Anna, which was a lot of fun. So, I think it just all sort of worked out really well, but that was a fun one to create.

CH: I have to say, too, Anna is an artist. My daughter's getting her degree in art, and at some point, I was like, "Oh, my God, my daughter is going to have the same degree as Anna." And Anna starts out the book working in a gas station [laughs].

KO: Not just working at a gas station, getting fired from a gas station [laughs]. Well, on that note of career choices, many of your heroines have artistic career paths. I'm thinking of Wild Seasons heroines, Fizzy Chen, who's a writer, from The True Love Experiment, and now Anna who's a painter, as we're talking about here. And these women, while they all do embrace their passions, there is an element of self-doubt along their journeys and they need to learn to really trust their talents and their inner voice, too. Is that something that either one of you has struggled with along your paths?

LB: You know, that's such an interesting question because I don't think we've ever been asked that, but I think as soon as you started saying that question, phrasing it, it was like, you know, both Christina and I had other jobs before we started writing, and in 2013, Beautiful Bastard, our first book, came out and we had six books out that year. And I was doing my job as a scientist, and Christina was working in a junior high counseling office, and we had these very established careers that we were excelling at and we knew we could do forever and we were very competent. And the writing thing was always this passion, this joy, and I think we had to really convince ourselves that we could make a career out of this. Even six books in, we were like, "Can we do this for a living?"

But at that point, nothing in our life was getting 100 percent. We both had small kids, we had full-time jobs, we had spouses, we had this writing career that was literally just taking over everything, and we had to make a choice. So, I think there is a piece of that that sort of echoes our experience, which is like, "We have this thing that we do, we do well, and we love it, but are we fooling ourselves into thinking this is real?" So, I think putting that into some of our heroines, maybe it's just sort of like echoing and re-expressing that journey that we went on, and telling our heroines, "Listen, you can trust yourself, you can do this."

CH: I mean, I always have imposter syndrome. So, yes [laughs]. Always.

KO: We've mentioned a number of characters now, and I'm curious if you have favorite heroes or heroines of the ones that you've created. I certainly have mine.

LB: Okay, who are yours? I'm curious to hear.

KO: Okay. Well, it was Will Sumner for the longest time, but then you made me River Peña and I just felt like I was betraying Will. So obviously there's some sort of scientist vibe for me here—

LB: I was going to say, you have a type [laughs]. I love it.

KO: Yeah, apparently. So, I think probably River, although I feel a little bit like I'm betraying Will there.

LB: Why choose? Isn't that a romance thing? Why choose?

KO: That's great. Yeah, let's go that vibe. And I've loved so many of your heroines along the way. I think that one feels almost tougher for me to pick among. I'm talking like they belong to me in some fashion. But as a long-time fan, that's what happens.

LB: As soon as they're out of our hands, they belong to you now.That's what I love about books.

KO: How about for you guys?

CH: So, I think writing Fizzy and The True Love Experiment and going on that tour, she's just such pure joy and she was so unexpected because we never planned on writing her as a main character. And she's just everything I want to be as an author and as a person. And she just makes me so happy. So, I think Fizzy. I just get a warm feeling in my chest whenever I think of Fizzy, because it just came out of nowhere and she just was so wonderful.

I really love Ansel from Sweet Filthy Boy so much. He's sort of my kryptonite. So much that when we were writing the other Wild Seasons books, I kept trying to find ways to put him in, like he's just sitting in the background eating something or whatever. And then I also just really, really love Olive and Ethan from The Unhoneymooners because they just crack me up. We had so much fun writing that book.

LB: Yeah, I would say Fizzy for sure as far as heroines go, and Hazel. I think those two are characters that Christina and I write very naturally. And I think a lot of it is because they sort of mirror the dynamic that we have when it's just the two of us, so I do love them. I love Harlow. I love her loyalty and her fire. I love that she would probably kill for anyone she loves. I love that strength in her.

And as far as heroes, I mean, Elliot, I just adore Elliot and Oliver. I'm such a sucker for a nerd. I have to say Leo from Something Wilder, he's so capable. Like, he can do anything. And there's something incredibly sexy about a man that is not just smart but also physically very capable. He's sort of like MacGyver in that way, and so I'm going to go with those three.

KO: All wonderful selections. I do think I could use Harlow Vega coming in and taking over some aspects of my life, just to like come get things into gear for me [laughs].

Christina: "I say my favorite thing about being part of Christina Lauren is I get to read Lo's words first. Like, she's such a beautiful writer, and the fact that I get to do this with her is such a gift."

CH: You know what's funny, too, is Harlow is very Lo. There's so much of Lo in Harlow. Like, if I had to pick a character that I feel like represents Lo the most, it would be Harlow. And the funniest thing is that Finn is probably the most like my husband. I was really struggling to write him and at one point Lo was like, "He's like Ryan." And as soon as she said that, I sort of went, "Oh, right." And then it was really funny because it was almost like we were writing my husband and Lo.

KO: That's interesting, though, that it was difficult for you to get into that head space. Were there other characters that you found particularly difficult to get to know in some fashion as you were sort of creating whole pictures?

LB: The first one that comes to mind is Lily from Something Wilder. And the reason is because we started writing that book late in the pandemic and we both were just ready to be done being inside. And so, initially, Lily was the city girl and Leo was the cowboy, and he was the one that was going to take her and a group of work colleagues on this trip into the Utah Red Rock Desert.

I started writing the first chapter, because I was going to write the Lily point of view, and it was just like she was this woman with a little sister she was sort of responsible for and carrying a lot of guilt and really protective of this person. And every time I started trying to write something, I just was like, "I don't want to write a story about a woman cooped up in a small apartment who has to take care of somebody else. Like, that is my life right now. I'm in my house with my kids, they're doing school online. I don't want to write this book." And so when we talked about it, we decided to flip it so that she was the cowgirl and Leo was the city boy. And as soon as we did that, it was just like the floodgates opened. It just unlocked everything.

And I think sometimes when a character just isn't speaking to us, it's because we've given them the wrong circumstances. That case, it was really obvious why. Like, I did not want to write about a mom making quesadillas five times a day for kids. But honestly, I think it really helped to sort of just pull back and say, "We're not tied to this. Nobody needs this to be the story. Let's make it something else."

CH: And I would say Connor was really hard to pin down because Fizzy is such a big character, and when we're putting our couples together, we figure out who is the perfect person for them. Not like who completes them, because that's not what we're looking for. So, like, who deserves Fizzy? She's just this huge personality. And I was writing Connor and just struggling so much and as soon as we made him a dad and British, it was like it sort of started to come together.

KO: That definitely hearkens back to that flexibility that you were talking about, right?

CH: Oh, yeah.

KO: Not being married to any early decisions that you've made and just letting, even if they're major swaps, happen. That's so interesting kind of what it can unlock.

LB: You know, I think we learned that lesson over and over and over is the thing. Sometimes that's really hard, but that's life.

KO: That's life. Now, as you guys shared earlier, you met and bonded over fan fiction. It was Twilight fan fiction, right? Back in 2009.

LB: Yes.

KO: Are there any other fandoms that you two have gone deep on together?

CH: So, if anybody can see my background behind us, we love BTS. And so we just have fangirl souls. It is like the best and worst part about us. We're big into One Direction. Our favorite thing to do, like our bonding time, is concerts. So we have seen One Direction so many times. And then BTS, we have gone to so many concerts. So many Harry Styles concerts. And right now, BTS, they're in the Army, so we are just waiting. We already got our comeback savings account started for when they go on tour and, yeah, it's our favorite thing to do is just embrace that fangirl part of each other.

LB: Yeah. And I would say the only fandom that we've written in together is Twilight. We're not really into fan fic for BTS or One Direction, but we love, love, love the concerts.

KO: Are you listening to their music as you're creating?

LB: So, I listen to music when I write. Christina doesn't. She basically needs to be in a sensory deprivation tank to write. And I tend to not listen to my faves when I'm writing because then I start paying attention to that instead of the words. I make a playlist of usually maybe five to 10 songs and I just loop it over and over and over and I try and capture the vibe of the book and the characters so that when we return to that book in edits, I put on that playlist and it kind of takes me back into that head space. And I can't listen to anything else. I kind of just listen to that.

KO: What was the style of your playlist for The Paradise Problem?

LB: It was very upbeat and I think there was a lot of Taylor Swift, because that was definitely my vibe last summer. She was an exception to not listening to my faves because I think it really kind of helped capture the joy of Anna and Liam. So, yeah, I think it was a lot of Taylor Swift.

KO: You two have really shaped my personal trope tastes. I owe my adoration of enemies-to-lovers and office romances specifically to Beautiful Bastard. What are your favorite tropes to read or to listen to?

CH: I am a sucker for enemies-to-lovers and I love to read it and I love to write it because it's just so fun and it lends itself to being funny, because you can be funny when you can be just a little bit mean. So, I love that. I learned when we were writing our Tangled book that I have a sort of a kryptonite for this sort of wounded hero that puts up a wall, and I didn't really know that about myself. So, I have become a sucker for that as well.

LB: I love long-term pining. I love pining in secret, so somebody who has been pining after someone else for ages and finally gets their chance, that is my favorite. Whether it's your older brother's best friend that you had a crush on throughout your life, like Hannah and Will in Beautiful Player, or a friend that you've had for a long time that you're in love with, like Oliver and Lola from Dark Wild Night, or even like Elliot and Macy in Love and Other Words that have been apart and he's just been in love with her forever. I think that sort of pining, that release when they finally get together, I just love writing toward that moment. There's no momentum like that momentum for me.

Lauren: "The writing thing was always this passion, this joy, and I think we had to really convince ourselves that we could make a career out of this. Even six books in, we were like, 'Can we do this for a living?'"

KO: Is there a trope that either of you feel like you wouldn't want to write or wouldn't want to tackle in one of your stories?

CH: When I was growing up, my mom was a huge romance reader and she read a ton of Western romances, to the point that I felt like I could probably write a Western romance. And a lot of those always have secret babies where somebody hasn't seen each other for a long time and then they run into each other and, "Oh, my God, that little... " You know that Heart song? You know, “She has your eyes” and stuff. So, in theory, I love those kinds of books. I don't think that we would ever write one because that seems very angsty and kind of fraught with its own problems. Then I'm like, "Well, why didn't she tell him?” So, I'm not sure we'd ever write that, but I like to read it.

LB: I love reading royal falling in love with the commoner. I'm not saying that we wouldn't do it, but I've never been inspired to write one. But I do love that premise of the sort of the prince or the princess who is out sneaking around and breaking curfew and falls in love with the girl at the bar or whatever.

KO: Great answers. You guys recently wrote your first audio original, The Honeymoon Crashers. It was a wonderful and immersive full-cast experience. Did your writing process change at all, creating an audio-first story?

LB: A little bit. I mean, the difference for the audio original was that it's part prose and part scripted, and we have written screenplays before. We wrote a screenplay for the movie Roomies, which we'll have some exciting information about very soon. And we wrote a screenplay for another one of our projects that hasn't been picked up quite yet, but it was really fun to write. And so the process of writing a screenplay is something that we're familiar with and we've spent a lot of time doing edits on the Roomies script. So, we know that process really well and, of course, we write books, so combining the two is actually really fun because sometimes when you're writing, when we're writing, what we'll do is, we'll just write out the dialogue and then flesh out the scene around the character so it's not just two talking heads.

But the beauty of a script is that it's primarily dialogue. And so I think the process of writing Honeymoon Crashers was very fast because we didn't have to worry about building the scene. We knew that the audio producers would do a lot of that lifting in terms of the sound and the casting and so we really got to just focus on the characters and them and their banter. So, I think it was really fun and it played to the things that we like about both of those types of writing, both the screenplay and the prose.

KO: Do you think you'll do another one?

CH: Oh, I hope so.

LB: I mean, we'd love to. It was really fun. I think the casting, they really knocked it out of the park with the casting. I'm glad that we didn't know that at the time, because I think it would've wonked us up a little bit to know that we would have Harry Shum Jr. and Jessica Marie Garcia as the leads. I think we would've been a little bit more freaked out. So, I mean, I would like to do another one. I think Christina would too. And I think it probably won't come out quite as quickly as it did the first time because we would want to, I think, we would just be a little bit more aware of the weight of it. And it was really fun. I mean, we really, really loved it and I think not overthinking it was a good thing in the end.

KO: You both mentioned that you are audiobook fans. What do you like about the audio medium?

CH: I mean, we spend a lot of time in front of our computers, so I love that, number one, I can be doing the dishes and driving and still get to read, but it gives my eyes a rest. And there's just something about a good narrator that can just completely change a story. I mean, as writers, we have gone through these books a bajillion times and sometimes a narrator will like deliver a line in a way we never thought. And it makes [us] see it in an entirely different way. I mean, that's sort of magic.

And I bet I listen to like three audiobooks a week maybe, depending on how much we have going on, especially on tour. There's nothing more fun than finding an audiobook that you absolutely love when we're going on tour. And then it almost makes you look forward to the airport times.

LB: For sure. So, the ones that I finished recently were Nikki Payne's books, Pride and Protest and Sex, Lies and Sensibility. And I think what I love about her books are the same thing that I love about a really good nonfiction audiobook, which is that having it read in the voice of the characters is totally transportive. Like, having the nonfiction narrator be the author telling you about this thing that they know more about than anyone in the world, and having Nikki's characters tell me their story with so much energy and humor, I think there's something that I know my own brain can't do that as well.

And so I just love the feeling of being told a story, on top of all of the reasons Christina gave, which is that sometimes it's really nice to not have to use my eyes for a bit. And lately I've been picking up a book and I immediately get sleepy, even if it's an amazing book. So I think it is really nice to just have the ability to listen and do something else and still be entertaining myself and doing my job.

KO: Absolutely. Although I will say, sometimes I do use audiobooks, a familiar story, if I can't quiet my brain at night, I'm like, "I'm just going to set that timer and let this do its job."

LB: Absolutely. Yeah.

CH: Or if you loved a book so much and you want to experience it again for the first time, I think that's a really good way to use audiobooks. If you are a hardcover reader or you are an e-book reader, but you loved something so much and you see all these people experiencing it for the first time and you're like, "I'm so jealous." Well, go listen to the audiobook. It'll be a different experience, you know?

KO: 100 percent. Yeah.

CH: We were coming home from Germany, or maybe it was France or something, and I rarely go back and listen or read our own books, but I listened to Sweet Filthy Boy and I was so delighted by it. I listened to it the entire flight, from the time we took off to the time we landed. And at the end I was like, "That was so much fun." Like, you forget how much fun it could be to just get lost in something from beginning to end. And it was amazing.

Christina: "And so we just have fangirl souls. It is like the best and worst part about us... Our favorite thing to do is just embrace that fangirl part of each other."

KO: That's wonderful, yeah, I understand as an audio listener of your stories. And you guys have had some wonderful, wonderful narrators perform your books as well. Jon Root and Patti Murin perform The Paradise Problem. And now you've worked with Patti several times at this point. You guys have had multiple collaborations. I know you're saying you don't go back and relisten, but is there ever anything where you're like, "Oh, I can kind of hear that in Patti's voice" as you're writing?

LB: I mean, I listen to all of our audiobooks on the day they come out. I do love listening to it, in part because it makes me so proud, in part because it is like experiencing something that I haven't experienced 500 times reading through it. I don't think that we think about the narrator before we finish the book, which is weird because we're both audiobook listeners, but we're not like writing it going, "Oh, this one is totally Jonathan Cole" or "Oh, this one is totally Jon Root." It's almost like we finish the book and then we think about that, which is strange that we do that, but I don't think we've ever had that conversation before the book is done.

CH: It was really crazy the first time we met Patti. We went to see Frozen on Broadway and we got to meet her for the first time. And this was before she had done any of our books, and so sometimes I do think of that. Like, when we were talking about casting Tangled, we were like, "It has to be Patti." Like, "She's a princess. It has to be."

LB: Yeah. And we have heard a clip and it is spectacular. She sounds like a Disney princess and you're just like, "Okay, this is exactly why we wanted her." She understood the assignment.

KO: Oh, I'm so excited. That'll be great. There was a profile on you both from a few years ago where you called 2013 a "renaissance for romance." And there was a similar resurgence in 2019, in my opinion, that was very rom-com-centric. And I think we've been lingering there for a bit. What are your thoughts on the current landscape of the genre?

LB: I do think that the genre, it's always evolving. There are always new sub-genres coming up, other sub-genres kind of coming out and they'll come back eventually. You know, 2013 was a big boom because it was sort of post-Fifty Shades. There was a huge rise in indie or self-publishing. And traditional publishers were really starting to pay attention to the kinds of things that people were publishing on their own. For a long time, I think publishers were saying, "Oh, we don't do that kind of story. We don't write romances with people who are 19, 20, 21." And indie publishers, indie authors were like, "This is what people want to read." And so trad publishers kind of took on some of that and we saw this big boon in new adult and rom-com started to come up.

And right now we have this rise in romantasy that we're seeing from Fourth Wing and Sarah J. Maas. And we're also seeing a rise in dark romance. And I think we could talk a lot about what that is about. I don't know if we have time to get into that today, but I do think it's really interesting seeing the ways that the genre shifts and the conversations that are happening in romance.

One of the things that I love so much about the genre is it does move really fast, moves faster than any other genre in publishing, frankly. And that's good news, bad news, right? We have the ability to say really important things about culture and who deserves a happily ever after and what does that look like. But we also in some ways have a responsibility that we didn't necessarily ask for, to have conversations about what a happily ever looks like. And so I think romance as a whole really needs to be thoughtful about the kinds of things that we put out there, the kinds of readers that we're putting it out in front of.

There's a lot of younger readers now on TikTok who are getting their book recommendations from each other, and whether we want it or not, we have a responsibility to make sure that we are putting responsible romantic choices out there. I think rom-coms really had a moment and are still having a moment. And in part I think that's probably because of the pandemic. I think a lot of people in 2020, late 2019 through probably 2022, just needed hope, you know? In a romance, the thing you are promised is a happily ever after. And when we were all deep in the pandemic, we just needed to know that there was hope at the end. And so I think that's partly why we saw the rom-com blast everywhere. But yeah, it's constantly changing and I think it's really interesting. That was the longest answer. I'm sorry, we just literally could go on about this for a long time.

CH: I'm just nodding my head along to everything she's saying.

KO: No, I'm like, "Can you teach a course?" Let's do it.

CH: We've had a lot of discussions lately about where we think romance is going and how we sort of miss the organizations and the big trade conventions, because this is where we all sort of talked about these things. Lo and I just gave this speech at our publisher's 100th anniversary about how important romance is and what it means to us. And we're just like such champions of the genre and the work it can do. And the reason it can do so many important things is because readers are guaranteed this happiness at the end of it. And so our daughters were very young when we started writing and they're so much older now. And so I think we're seeing it through maybe a different lens of 14- and 23-year-old and which books are being pointed at them and sort of how they're reacting to them. And it's a big conversation.

Lauren: "One of the things that I love so much about the genre is it does move really fast...We have the ability to say really important things about culture and who deserves a happily ever after and what does that look like."

KO: Yeah, I mean, all important things to consider, and especially you're touching on the social of it all. That has become a much more pervasive side of being an author and it's factoring more into the business of being an author, which as a creative person, isn't always necessarily something that you want to be focusing your time and attention on, but it is a reality of this. And with romance, to what you were saying earlier, Lauren, it kind of sets the tone for the rest of publishing in so many ways.

LB: Yeah. It's good news, bad news for us. I mean, we have a lot of cultural influence, but we have a lot of cultural influence. And so we need to really think about the weight of that and what we want to put out there.

KO: So, 30 books in, how do you each measure success?

CH: Oh, wow.

LB: Okay, this one, I can tell you immediately, I have never been able to sort of take a breath and slow down and not work. And I have not actually done that much from January 1st to like April 1st. Christina and I did something different this time where we each drafted a book and we're sort of trading. And the one that I drafted is the one we're anticipating turning in in May. And I wrote it, it was a mess. I didn't know how to fix it and I just sort of sent it off to her and said, "I don't know what to do." And she's like, "I got it." And because we've carved out time in our schedule that we can do this, I have been able to just sort of step back and say, "I don't have to do anything right now. I can just let my brain recover and like refill the well." And I think success for me is being able to remember that we have an established career, our publisher is not going anywhere, our readers are happy with our books, and we can just slow down a little bit.

CH: I would definitely agree with that. Like I said, we gave this talk at our publisher’s anniversary party, and I had this moment afterward when we were done, going, "I'm so glad I didn’t put too much thought into who would be out in the audience and that we were sort of representing romance, this thing that means so much to us," because I felt like it would've made me even more scared. And at the end, normally I would've been like, "Who am I to talk about this and that?" But at the end I was like, "No, this is a thing that means so much to me and I know about and I love, and I care about its past and its future." And that was just a big moment for me to be like, "No, we did belong up there talking about this." And to see people's reactions afterward and people we admire so much, saying, "Thank you so much for talking about this thing. I never looked at romance and what it does." It was such a career high for me that I was just so unbelievably proud of us and our genre and stuff, and it just meant the world.

LB: It was amazing. After our talk, Jennifer Egan came up to us and she was talking about how she teaches a class on genre at Penn and she really wants to learn more about romance as a genre. And John Irving, who we saw in the lobby the next morning and was like, "I just want you to know I really loved what you said last night." And it was like, these are things that had you told me we would have these conversations a week before, I would've been like, "You're crazy. You're just trying to get me to not be nervous." I mean, like she said, I'm so glad that we didn't think about the scale of it because I think we would've been locked up, but it was really just the most amazing opportunity and such an honor to be asked.

CH: We got our picture with Judy Bloom.

KO: Highlight! [Laughs].

CH: I know.

KO: What is next for you guys?

LB: Well, we're sort of on the bubble with a lot of different projects for adaptation to film. So we're hoping this year sees a bunch of Christina Lauren things going on in that sense. And we're working on a book that is a mess that Christina's fixing. And then after that, I think what's lovely is, we can kind of just figure out what we want to write, you know? We have this book due in May and then one more on contract, and then we might just say, "Let's do something totally crazy different." I think we will always write romance. We love romance, but what that looks like specifically, that's what we want to play with a little bit. So, who knows?

CH: And I think in the past that would've made us sort of anxious, but it's actually been sort of delightful to be like, "What do we want to do?”

KO: I'm sure, yeah. And you know that we will all follow you wherever that path goes.

[laughter]

Thank you both so much for your time today. I really appreciated the opportunity to speak with you.

LB: Thank you. This is amazing. We love you guys so much and this was just a really fun conversation.

KO: And listeners, you can get The Paradise Problem by Christina Lauren right now on Audible.