Pop-Culturalist.com

Christina Lauren is a pen name for best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The author duo writes young adult and adult fiction, and they have a total of seventeen New York Times best-selling books. Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to get the opportunity to interview them about their most recent book, Something Wilder.

PC: To start, please tell our readers about your novel, Something Wilder.
Christina Lauren: Hi! Thank you for having us! We are so excited for Something Wilder, which came out May 17th. It’s a book we wrote in the depths of pandemic lockdown when we absolutely could not stand to write a book that takes place indoors! [laughs] It’s a love letter to Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones, The Hangover, and every romance novel that ever made us want to write. We wanted to write something high stakes and action-packed, but, of course, with the CLo romance throughout.

The story is about Leo Grady and Lily Wilder (the name is an homage to Joan Wilder, of course) who fell in love years ago while working together at Lily’s family’s ranch. Ten years later, Leo has returned to his humdrum life in New York, and Lily is barely scraping by. Her father was a treasure chaser, and as much as Lily resented his obsession, she now relies on his maps to take tourists out on fake treasure hunts in the Canyonlands of southern Utah.

When Leo and a group of his friends show up to do one of these trips, neither Leo nor Lily is prepared to face their former love. But a bigger problem arises when everything on the trip goes horribly and hilariously wrong, and the group discovers that the treasure they’ve been hunting all this time might be very real. Working together, Lily and Leo’s chemistry reignites while they work to decipher the clues her father may or may not have ever intended her to find.

PC: I love the way both of you write romance novels and always leave us, the readers, wanting more. Do you have any advice for aspiring romance novelists, like tips on raising the stakes in a romance?
Christina Lauren: One of our romance heroes, Sarah Maclean says that the way to maintain tension in writing a romance is to constantly ask yourself, “Why can’t they be together right now?” If you don’t have a good answer for that, then your stakes aren’t high enough. Creating true barriers and obstacles is hard, but they don’t only have to be internal (such as being a workaholic or having a fear of commitment); external conflicts (family strife or work competition between leads) are important too, and every good book has more than one reason why the hero and heroine can’t be together.

PC: Who was your easiest and hardest character to write about in Something Wilder?
Christina Lauren: Honestly, they were all easy! Leo and Lily feel very real and dimensional to us. The side characters that were the most fun to write were probably Nicole and Walter. It’s always fun to write the comic relief. This book was a total joy. Some of the plot lines were hard to weave together, and in edits, we worked very hard to smooth out the pacing of the story, but the characters themselves were there from page one.

PC: How has COVID-19 affected the way your writing routine goes?
Christina Lauren: Other than not being able to see each other as often as we were used to, the pandemic didn’t change our process too much. Lauren lives in California and Christina is in Utah, so we already wrote remotely—on Zoom and text and email and phone calls all day. We’ve joked (wryly, of course) how COVID-19 made everyone else work the way we always have.

PC: What is your writing routine like?
Christina Lauren: We outline together and then split up the chapters (usually alternating or by POV) and then draft in our own spaces, compiling as we go. Once we have a draft, we edit, edit, edit. And as far as daily routine goes, we treat it like any other job: we get up, get to our desks, and work through whatever we have planned for the day!

PC: What was the inspiration for the fanfiction The Office that Christina wrote?
Christina: I used to read my mom’s romance novels as a teen, and it felt like the love scenes always happened in the last third of the book. In fic, we used to talk about UST—unresolved sexual tension—and I wanted to write something where the sex happened at the very beginning [laughs], but nothing is resolved. If anything, the UST gets worse!

PC: Do you have any favorite fanfiction that you’d recommend to your readers?
Christina Lauren: We don’t have time to read a ton of fanfiction anymore (sadly!), but our favorites back in the day were The Blessing and the Curse by theblackarrow, Tropic of Virgo by in.a.blue.bathrobe, and The Submissive by tarasueme, which became a published book series.

PC: How do you handle who writes which scenes in a novel?
Christina Lauren: We write whatever is in our “assigned” chapter but will leave things for the other if we know it plays to their strength. Christina is great at descriptions of landscapes and settings. Lo will usually write the emotional gut-punch scenes.

PC: Which Taylor Swift era (debut, reputation, Lover, Fearless, Speak Now, evermore, Folklore, Red, 1989) would resonate with Duke and Lily from Something Wilder?

Christina Lauren: Red!

PC: Were there any scenes from Something Wilder that got cut that you’d like to tease/share?
Christina Lauren: We always cut scenes from every book, but what stands out the most in Something Wilder is having to cut characters. It was tough because we really loved each of them, and they each served a purpose in the dynamic of the group, but it was a lot of names and descriptions in a short number of pages. Two of them had to go, and those personality traits and lines were sort of rolled over into the remaining cast.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: Audiobooks, physical books, or e-books?
Lauren: e-book.

Christina: Audiobook.

PC: If you could write in another genre, what would it be and why?
Lauren: Nonfiction because I get so sucked into true stories that sound unbelievable. I’d also love to write a pop-science book someday.

Christina: Thriller.

PC: Currently reading or watching?
Lauren: Recently finished A Hundred Other Girls by Iman Hariri-Kia, and it’s GREAT. Watching 21/25 (obsessed) and Ozark with my husband.

Christina: I’m about to watch the second season of Bridgerton! The last book I finished was Hook, Line, and Sinker by Tessa Baily, and my current read is Book Lovers by Emily Henry.

PC: Are you a plotter, pantser, or plantser (both)?

Christina Lauren: Plotters!

PC: Which Taylor Swift era best describes you?

Lauren: Lover or 1989.

Christina: Oh my gosh. I don’t know! Some of my favorite songs are on reputation and Red so we’ll go with those.

You can follow Christina Lauren here!