SATIRE
How To Write Like Colleen Hoover
7 secrets to the success of a writer whose books outsold the Bible last year
Colleen Hoover’s novels are often called “trauma porn.” This is unfair to porn.
A typical porn catalog has films about people of varied ages, races, and sexual tastes. Hoover’s novels are about young white women who fall for young white men. A porn shop that offered so little diversity would go out of business.
There are also plot differences. Porn films deliver fodder for sexual fantasies. Hoover’s novels deliver multiple crowd-pleasers: “love stories, unabashed smut, trauma plots, tear-jerking soap opera, and wild narrative twists,” as the critic Laura Miller wrote on Slate. “They are the everything bagels of popular fiction.”
Miller is right, but how do you write an “everything bagel”? What does it take to become an author who, in 2022, outsold John Grisham, James Patterson, and the Bible. And who had an astounding 15 novels on bestseller lists at once?
Here are seven tips on how to write like Hoover.
