Colleen Hoover does not care if you think her prose is too simple. She skips description when she reads, so she skips it when she writes. Twenty-six books in, she has no plans to change.
"As a reader, I get very distracted and I skip over description a lot," Hoover tells Ponton. "I just want fast-paced novels." So when she started writing, she wrote exactly that: books that move like movies, light on scenery, heavy on what happens next. "I was like, oh my God, I'm so bad at this," she says of her early attempts. Then she read other writers with their lush, layered sentences and thought: I am writing a book I would want to read.
"I will never use a thesaurus." Colleen Hoover
That decision built an empire. Hoover is the rare author who can claim both BookTok ubiquity and multi-film adaptation deals. But the success has not softened her stance. "Sometimes I'll see other people criticize my writing style, and I'm like, I will never change it," she says. "I enjoy it, and I know a lot of people enjoy it."
The Diet Pepsi Drinker's Novelist
Hoover's aesthetic philosophy extends beyond the page. She is also, for the record, an evangelist for Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke, a preference she discusses at length during the episode. (She can tell you if a Diet Pepsi is expired or which restaurant it came from.) She brings the same clarity of preference to prose: no filler, no decoration, just the thing itself.
"I don't want to hear about the trees or the sky," she says. "I want to know where is the character going. Why are they going there?" It is a reader-first mentality that doubles as a defense of populist fiction. Hoover is not writing to impress other novelists. She is writing to give distracted readers a reason to keep the phone down.
Every Book Starts as a Rom-Com
Hoover also reveals a pattern in her process that explains why so many of her books veer into darkness. "Every book I write starts out as a rom-com and doesn't end that way," she says. She begins with the intention of writing something light, then finds herself drawn toward heavier emotion. "I need a lot to feel," she explains. "So I just keep making more and more things happen to the characters."
That pull toward intensity is why Verity exists. Hoover says the thriller was born from a writing exercise a decade ago, published under a different title in a charity anthology, then expanded when she needed to deliver another book during a production hiatus. She had been thinking about it for months before writing the draft in a feverish 18-hour-a-day sprint. "I was so into it," she says.
The book's famously ambiguous ending was not planned. Two weeks before the manuscript was due, Hoover was still writing toward a definitive conclusion. Then, lying in bed one night, the alternative hit her. She got up and wrote the version readers know: the one that spawned a thousand Reddit threads and team-manuscript-versus-team-letter debates.
"Every book I write starts out as a rom-com and doesn't end that way." Colleen Hoover
Her Husband Is Banned From Reading Her Books
Hoover's husband has not read one of her novels since he kept interrupting her mid-draft to ask if she approved of a character's actions. "He can't separate my imagination from my morals," she says. After that experience, she instituted a household rule: he is not allowed to read her work. If he cannot distinguish between what she invents and what she believes, Verity would destroy him.
The comment lands as both funny and revealing. Hoover writes characters who make catastrophic choices, and she is comfortable letting those choices stand without authorial judgment. That refusal to moralize is part of what makes the books compulsively readable and part of what makes some readers uneasy.
On the Verity Movie and the Letter Question
Ponton asks the question every Verity reader wants answered: manuscript or letter? Hoover will not commit. "When I finished writing it from Lowen's point of view, I was as confused as she was," she says. At the time, she believed the manuscript was real. But years later, after writing an annotated edition and re-reading the book, she felt sympathy for Verity. "I've been on both sides, and I really don't know where I stand now," she admits.
The film adaptation, starring Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson, and Josh Hartnett, preserves that ambiguity. Hoover says she and director Michael Showalter were nervous about how audiences would receive it, but early reactions have been enthusiastic. The biggest change from page to screen: two children instead of three. "There's a lot of death," Hoover explains. Amazon gave notes.
"I don't want to hear about the trees or the sky. I want to know where is the character going. Why are they going there?" Colleen Hoover
Hoover is ten thousand words into her next thriller, a contained story with 31 planned chapters, though she is quick to add that her outlines never survive contact with the draft. "I write way more than I keep," she says. "But to get what I keep, I have to write a lot of crap that I throw away." It is advice for aspiring novelists: you will write a whole book you hate before you write one you do not.
For now, Hoover is content to keep doing what she does, thesaurus-free, for readers who want the story and nothing else.