Ali Hazelwood on Trusting Her Own Voice After BookTok Fame

Goodreads: What was your inspiration for Love on the Brain?

Ali Hazelwood: I actually wrote the book while I was on submission with The Love Hypothesis. My agent was pitching the book to editors during the pandemic for many, many months, and literally no one was interested, so one of the things that my agent suggested was, “Why don't you just write another book? In case no one buys The Love Hypothesis and it never gets published, we have something else to pitch to editors.”
 
I was mostly a fan fiction writer before, so Love on the Brain, in many ways, is the first book that I've ever written from scratch. I kind of didn't even know where to start, and my agent guided me a lot. She was like, I would love to read an academic rivals-to-lovers story, and then she was like, I’d love it if maybe these rivals are communicating but they don't know that they're communicating. She gave me a bunch of tropes that she wanted me to build the story around, which was really, really helpful because I am very indecisive and had no idea what I was doing.

GR: So, where did you start? What was the writing process like for this book?

AH: It was difficult for me, I'll admit, because writing fan fiction is much different. I had to read a lot of craft books, like, for example, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Books that tell you how to fill the story with plot. That’s something that fan fiction doesn’t necessarily have to have. It’s mostly about the characters and their interactions, so you don't need to have a story with a first, second, and third act and the beats and character arcs.

There was also a lot of going back and reading all my favorite romance novels and trying to figure out what I loved about them and what the arcs were in them and trying to kind of mimic them.

And then, of course, there was a lot of asking all of my friends—who are also writers and readers—to read the book, tell me what was wrong, and what I should fix.
 
At some point, we did sell my first book to Berkeley, so I had my amazing editor help me get that story [and this one] into shape. It was truly a labor of a million people helping me get this book to a decent state. There was a lot of asking for help. That's my process.

I hope that, as I write more and more, I'll become a little bit more independent and I won’t have to harass people, but, as of right now, I'm still at a phase in my writing where I really need a lot of help and a lot of guidance. I definitely need all of the hand-holding that I can get!

GR: What’s the most challenging part of writing a novel versus fan fiction, and what’s the most rewarding?

AH: Starting with rewarding, I think there are fewer constraints. When you’re writing fan fiction, you're trying to write about certain characters, so you’re following the personality of those characters. When you're writing stuff that is original, you can really go wherever, so that’s kind of cool.

But there are definitely pros and cons to that, too. I'm a very obsessive person, so writing within the constraints of fan fiction and the constraints of characters that have already been created is kind of reassuring just because I am such a scaredy cat. [Laughs.] I second-guess myself a lot, and I think that's what makes it so hard for me to write original stuff. I'm like, should I change this? I literally could go whatever direction because it's my book, it's not anyone else's, so I could change this…but would it be better if I did this other thing? So I think, for me, part of what's hardest is just committing and deciding that I can be true to myself and to what I want.

GR: You also come from a background in academic writing that I’m sure is more structured; there isn’t much room for imagination. Do you prefer that more?

AH: There's definitely something about it that is less scary just because, as you said, it's very structured. Scientific language is kind of always the same, so once you've been doing this for a couple of years, you know exactly what to say and what to write. It’s completely different, but at the same time, there are things that academic writing and fiction writing have in common, which is more this idea that you have to pre-plan what you want to write. You have to figure out what you want this specific part or sentence to convey. As I practice and write more fiction writing, that helps me with academic writing and vice versa.

GR: You’re a professor and have a background in neuroscience, similar to the main character Bee in Love on the Brain. Is there much overlap between what she does and what you teach and studied?

AH: I don't do her type of research now; she does brain stimulation, and that's something that I did during my master's program. I actually worked in a lab that did brain stimulation and always thought it was really cool, so I definitely wanted to write about it.

My doctorate and my thesis are different from what she does, but we are in the same overarching area of neuroscience, which is cognitive neuroscience. We are both interested in how the brain and behavior map onto each other. So that was really fun, taking my favorite things about the brain and about neuroscience and merging them in the book. Her love of neuroscience is similar to my love of neuroscience.

I’m gonna be real. I was also like, Oh, if I make my main character a neuroscientist, I wouldn't have to do a whole lot of research. [Laughs.] So there was a bit of laziness there.

GR: I'm guessing you still had to do a lot of research!

AH: Oh yeah, 100 percent. Since brain stimulation is not my main area, I definitely had to look into that. I used that technology during my master's, but it's been, like, eight years, and neuroscience progresses very quickly. We know so little about the brain, we learn a lot every year, and what is considered state-of-the-art changes. I also don't know anything about engineering, and the main male character is an engineer, so I had to figure something out there.

GR: Love on the Brain also touches on the dark side of academia, including the sexism that's prevalent. Why was that important for you to write about and incorporate into the book?

AH: It really started from fan fiction. Even back when I was writing about Star Trek characters, I would set them in an academic context, which I know seems weird. I think I started writing fiction when I was in the final year of my Ph.D. and I was writing my dissertation, and I was feeling very much overwhelmed by the academic culture and the sexism. I am a woman in STEM, which of course is the minority, but I am also privileged because I am a white woman in STEM. Being a woman of color in STEM is like 70 million times harder.
 
There was this feeling like I just wanted to take my experience and my struggles and make fun of it a little bit: write about it in a way that would exorcise some of the worst parts of it. It feels to me like if I can take these hardships and these difficult moments that I experienced and put them in a context that I can control and can make a little bit fun of, and if I can give my characters a happy ending, it can kind of be cathartic for me.

GR: Twitter plays a big part in the book. What prompted you to bring social media into the mix?

AH: I wanted to have a You've Got Mail trope going on, and Twitter seemed like a good way of having my two characters become friends before they even knew who the other person was. Academic Twitter is very active, and that's where a lot of conversations about academia are going on, so it just felt like a good setting. My favorite academic account is Shit Academics Say, and that's kind of what I modeled both Bee and Levi's accounts after. These are places where you can find community, but also take a look at academia in a funny way and in a jokey way.

GR: What’s your personal relationship with social media like?

AH: I'm gonna be honest. All of my best friends I found through social media back when I was in fandom. It's really great because you get to find people that share your interests. There were a few years when I was an adult that I didn't really have many friends, and I think that's because I was working all the time and I didn't really have a whole lot of time to cultivate other interests. Once I started getting really interested in fan fiction, that's where I met a bunch of people, and now I have some of the best friends I've ever had in my entire life. I'm incredibly grateful.
 
I definitely try to set boundaries. For example, right now, I really couldn't keep up with like five different platforms, so I'm mostly on Instagram. I still have my Twitter account and a Facebook page, but I don't really go to other social media. Also, for me, social media can become addictive very fast, and I can truly waste hours. I need to set boundaries so that I can be a productive adult.

GR: I know that The Love Hypothesis kind of blew up on TikTok. What was your reaction to that?

AH: That was amazing. I wasn't very familiar with TikTok at all. I remember my good friend Jen telling me that a video about my book had, like, a million views. And I was like, What is going on? I couldn't even comprehend it. BookTokers are just so creative. The way they talk about books is so engaging and fun.
 
I actually really like TikTok, I have to say. I get really into it when people bake cakes. I really like anything that is crafty. Like literally can spend five hours just watching people do stuff. I love it so much, it's really a problem.

GR: You mentioned earlier that you read a lot of romance books leading up to writing your novels. Are there any authors or specific books that really influenced your writing?

AH: I read Lisa Kleypas a lot. I remember thinking I wanted to write a story that's similar to hers.

One of my favorite books, ever, is The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang.

Sherry Thomas is my favorite because she writes a lot of historical romance novels in which the main characters fall in love because of a shared interest, and many times the shared interest is something within academia or STEM. The way she writes about it is something that I was trying desperately to mimic.

I also finished for the second time a couple of days ago one of my favorite books that I’ve ever read, which is Pride and Protest. It’s a Pride and Prejudice retelling by Nikki Payne that's publishing this November. I’m literally going to stop people on the street and tell them to read it. It's just a masterpiece. It’s so, so good.

GR: Are there any other books that you're reading and loving right now?

AH: I recently finished Chloe Liese’s book Two Wrongs Make a Right [also out in November]. It made me feel so seen. She writes characters who are neurodivergent, and I loved it so much.

I'm currently reading Sally Thorne’s Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match. I’m about halfway through, and it's such a ride. It’s so funny and unique, I truly haven't read anything like it. It’s very romantic and sexy, which is weird because he's like a zombie. She makes it work so well.

I've read recently Farrah Rochon’s The Hookup Plan, which was amazing, too. I love it because the main character is a doctor, and she's just so badass. It’s my favorite trope of "we hate each other but the sexual attention is so high there that they just end up having sex." And then Denise Williams’ Do You Take This Man also has a similar trope.
 
GR: What’s next for you?

AH: We're actually still editing my third book, so I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it because I'm like, are we gonna change everything? But the title is Love Theoretically, and it's a book about two rival physicists. She is a theoretical physicist, and he is an experimental physicist, and they both think their discipline is better. They end up falling in love, but it’s also a weird twist on the fake dating trope in the sense that she ends up with the brother of the guy she's fake dating. I don’t think that part is going to change about the book, but I don’t know. We’re still very deep into editing, so more to come. I promise.