the love hypothesis is a fanfic

'The Love Hypothesis' Author Ali Hazelwood on Getting Her Start in Fanfiction and Which Scene Didn't Make It Into the Final Book

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The day before I was set to chat with Ali Hazelwood , the news broke that her debut novel The Love Hypothesis had officially become a New York Times bestseller , charting at #9 in print and at #11 on the combined print and ebook lists. Understandably, Hazelwood's recollection of the moment she found out about it from her editor at Berkley Publishing is a little hazy: "I think I had grilled cheese in my mouth. I have vague memories of trying not to choke."

But it's no surprise, taking into account that the book itself has been absolutely blowing up a certain section of TikTok lately — as well as considering The Love Hypothesis 's origin story. When Hazelwood decided to make the leap from writing fanfiction to becoming a published author, readers flocked in droves, and even though The Love Hypothesis is a completely original work, there are still some nods to its beginnings — like the cover, for example. In my conversation with Hazelwood, which you can read below, I spoke with her about how both her background in fanfic and in STEM informed the writing of The Love Hypothesis , the one steamy scene in particular that didn't make the final cut, and what she can tease about her next book.

COLLIDER: Congratulations on the book being out! I think some people know the backstory of how it came to be, but for those who don't, what's the genesis behind The Love Hypothesis ?

ALI HAZELWOOD: I think it was a lot of just luck and chances and opportunities. I was really, really into writing fanfiction, first for the Star Trek fandom and then for the Star Wars fandom. And I loved it. It was just, it was this amazing community. I made a lot of friends and I was just having a lot of fun. And then what happened is that I started slowly thinking about trying to write something original, just to challenge myself and to do something different. And while I was in that kind of mood, my agent started reading my fanfiction on AO3 and then she reached out with a DM. She was like, "I saw that you wrote something about maybe pulling some of your fics and reworking them. And I wanted to tell you that I'm a literary agent and I would love to see you some of your manuscripts, if you're interested in it."

And so that's how I took the fanfiction of mine that I thought was the most reworkable and I sent it to her and then I signed with her. And then after approximately 70 billion more revisions, both with her and an editor... we got a lot of RNRs [revise and resubmits] that didn't pan out but made the book better, because we got really good feedback. Then we ended up at Berkely with my current editor, Sarah [Blumenstock], who is amazing, and yeah, now it's out.

I feel like we're definitely seeing more authors who are like, "I totally got my background in fanfiction and there's nothing wrong with that." One of the more famous examples is obviously Christina Lauren.

HAZELWOOD: Christina Lauren. They're amazing.

Or even authors today who are like, "Oh yeah, I'm writing this mainstream book, but I still have an AO3 profile." So I appreciate that we're seeing the barriers break down around what the public perception of fanfiction is and how it really is such a great breeding ground for authors to find their voice.

HAZELWOOD: Absolutely. Fanfiction is just an amazing medium. It's great, like you said, to find your voice, to explore things that you usually don't find in traditional publishing. But it's also just great to feel a sense of community and to get to know people, to find someone who's like-minded and is interested in similar things. It's very hard to make friends as an adult. And I feel like I truly found my adult friends through fanfiction and through the fandom community.

And I just, I'm very grateful to my publisher that they embraced the fanfiction part. They were like, "Yes, we're going to own this. For the cover, we're going to use fanart made for the fanfiction, if you want to." They were just great with that. I do think traditional publishing is getting more and more interested in fanfiction and in embracing it. And maybe they're doing well because of money and marketing and stuff like that, but I'm just really happy that this is happening and that fanfiction is gaining legitimacy, because it always had legitimacy.

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I want to talk a little bit too about the setting of the book, and I know your personal background is in STEM. So did that inform your inspiration on where to set the story, drawing from your own experiences?

HAZELWOOD: Yeah, 100%. I'd been wanting to write fanfiction set in academia just because it's really... I'm a professor right now, but I feel like my entire adult life has been spent in academia. I feel like I would struggle to write any other setting, in a weird way. So it was just the more natural setting for a story. My next book is going to be set in academia and my third book is going to be in academia. And yeah, that's the easiest thing for me.

One of the things I personally love about the book is how it references romance tropes in the world, but then the book itself subverts the tropes. I'm thinking specifically about the only-one-bed scene, and then there's not only one bed, which felt like a really funny wink at romance readers. What made you decide to include that meta-awareness in the story?

HAZELWOOD: It's actually really funny. I never would have thought to include that if the story hadn't been fanfiction originally. I was posting it chapter by chapter and I was writing it chapter by chapter. And I remember all the comments saying, "They're going to go to the conference and there's going to be only one bed."

So it started as just like a conversation with other people in the fandom, who were at the same time writing fanfiction about other iterations of the same characters. It was just so much fun. It was kind of like a collective effort there.

You had talked about how when you were reworking the fic for publication, there were a lot of edits, and I'm assuming a lot of things ended up on the chopping block. Is there a deleted scene that didn't make it into the final novel that you maybe wished you could have kept in?

HAZELWOOD: So when Adam and Olive break up — not really break up, but when she goes to his hotel room and she's like, "It's over." Originally, they ended up having sex in that scene. And we took it out because we thought it was more poignant, or I don't know, more heartfelt if it was only a kiss. And it was, in a way, but the fanfiction person within me kind of misses...

Let them have one more time!

HAZELWOOD: The fanfiction ho within me was like, "I wish we had kept that sex scene." But honestly, honestly, we talked about it — my editor, my agent, and I — and it was a good call from a story-structure perspective.

So you mentioned you've got a second and third book in the works. I'm sure you probably can't really talk about book three yet, but is there anything you can tease about book two coming up?

HAZELWOOD: Book two is about a neuroscientist who is selected to work on a project at NASA. And she's super excited about it, until she gets told that the person she's going to co-lead the project with is an engineer that she used to work with in the past, and they're kind of enemies. Or at least she thinks they're enemies, one of those things. And that's the story of them working together on this project. And it's coming out in August 2022.

I thought it would be fun to wrap up with a couple of rapid-fire questions. Enemies-to-lovers, or friends-to-lovers?

HAZELWOOD: Enemies-to-lovers. Reylo forever.

Secret billionaire or secret baby?

HAZELWOOD: Secret billionaire.

Marriage of convenience or amnesia?

HAZELWOOD: Marriage of convenience.

Coffee or tea?

HAZELWOOD: Tea.

I feel like I know the answer to this last one, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Macfadyen Darcy or Firth Darcy?

HAZELWOOD: Macfadyen. I mean, 2005 forever. Even though I do appreciate Firth. He's a good high-quality Darcy, but it's just not my Darcy.

I feel like everybody has a very strong opinion, based on which one you saw first. That lake scene, I'm sure that's very formative.

HAZELWOOD: 100%.

But for me? He's walking through the field in the morning mist, and that's it. In the long coat.

HAZELWOOD: He says, "I love you" three times. I mean, she has bewitched him body and soul. Come on, come on. The hand flex!

The Love Hypothesis is currently available in print, e-book and audio wherever books are sold .

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From Fanfic to Bookshop Pick: The Love Hypothesis

By Emma Regan and Jordan Maxwell Ridgway

This article is the first in a series exploring the world of fanfiction. Fanfiction has not only been growing in popularity amongst readers over the years, but it is also proving to be prime training for writers wanting to break into the industry. This week we will be discussing The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood and its success.

Fanfiction is typically unauthorised material written by fans and based on existing works. There has been a full range of responses from authors and copyright owners, both positive and negative. The earliest cited use of the term ‘fanfiction’ dates back to 1939 and has deep roots in the fantasy and science fiction genres. However, all literary buffs are aware that writers, such as Shakespeare, were known to ‘borrow’ and put their own spin on existing characters and plots.

Today, fanfiction can be found on sites such as Wattpad and Archive of Our Own (AO3), amongst others. Fanfiction is believed to have a largely female-based reader and author demographic, but a growing portion of the transgender and non-binary or genderfluid community are reading and producing works of their own too. Fanfiction also appears to appeal to young people as a way to reimagine the content they love and hone their craft.

As Ali Hazelwood said in an interview with Collider , “It's great, like you said, to find your voice, to explore things that you usually don't find in traditional publishing.” In the same article, Hazelwood expresses her joy that publishing houses are taking a growing interest in fanfiction and its marketability, and how this is lending further “legitimacy” to the medium. Fanfiction has, over recent years, felt like a pejorative: a disclaimer to suggest the work should not be taken seriously in its own right. This likely stems from the work not being purely original, cited as enough cause for dismissal. But it could be said that Shakespeare may have created the term ‘star-cross’d lovers,’ but he hardly invented the trope.

It is notable that fanfiction is often based on the trials and tensions between characters from popular franchises, and so it is unsurprising that a lot of the successful examples of fanfiction translated into original works fit into the romance genre. Despite its profitability and demand, it is still a genre that can be dismissed as ‘fluff.’ Considering this fact, along with the dismissal of fanfiction, as well as its demographic, it’s hard not to see the compounded odds stacked against its favour in its quest for legitimacy, surely making successful transitions even more rejoiceful.

The Love Hypothesis is one of many book titles which have gained popularity via TikTok, through the ‘BookTok’ community. It is a romance book set in academia which follows the story of Ph.D. candidate Olive Smith and “young, hotshot professor” Adam Carlsen, as they manage to find themselves caught up in needing to portray a convincing, romantic relationship and includes various other tropes used in romance novels (with quite a few of those being subverted too).

However, you might notice the two people depicted on the book’s cover look eerily like characters from a popular franchise. Ali Hazelwood started off writing fanfiction on Archive of Our Own (AO3), first for the Star Trek fandom before moving onto writing Star Wars - if you haven’t figured it out yet, the main characters of The Love Hypothesis are based on Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker from the latest Star Wars trilogy. AO3 is where The Love Hypothesis first started (although it was under a different title then) amongst all her other fanfiction. It was there where Hazelwood found a community of other ‘fanfic’ writers and gained a strong following of readers that were enamoured by her work. Soon after, Hazelwood started to consider the process of moving from fanfiction writing to producing original content, when a literary agent, who had been reading her work, reached out to her via social media and asked to read some of her manuscripts. It was then a process of working out which pieces of fanfiction Hazelwood had written that would be the easiest to adapt into an original novel.

The Love Hypothesis doesn’t shy away from its origins though. As mentioned above, the cover of the book distinctly shows who the main characters, Olive and Adam, are based on by using fanart that was produced when the story was merely fanfiction, something the author was adamant on. Adam Carlson is also close to the name of Kylo Ren’s actor, Adam Driver, so the links to the original piece of work are there. This shows just how much traditional publishing is embracing the concept of fanfiction and that it isn’t afraid to look at it for up-and-coming authors.

Moreover, We’d Know By Then by Kirsten Bohling is another book that has been recently published with origins as another ‘Reylo’ fanfic, this time, using the soulmate trope.

Could this be the new trend within traditional publishing? Or do you think original fanfiction is the best place to get your dose of romance?

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Academic Romance Is My New Favorite Book Genre After Reading This Debut Novel

If you told me that my favorite book of 2021 would end up being about two fake-dating scientists whose characters are loosely based on Rey and Kylo Ren from Star Wars, I would not have believed you. Fake dating isn't my favorite trope, science was my worst school subject, and while I've always enjoyed watching Star Wars, I wouldn't exactly call myself a fan. But that was before I read The Love Hypothesis (out Sept. 14) by Ali Hazelwood.

In the novel, Olive Smith is a biology PhD student who is on a mission to convince her best friend that she's in a relationship. Considering she's definitely single, and worried that her friend will learn the truth, Olive randomly panic-kisses the first man she comes across in the lab — who just so happens to be the notoriously intimidating Dr. Adam Carlsen, a professor in her department. Nobody is more surprised than Olive when Adam agrees to go along with her charade. But how long can Olive keep up the ruse of fake dating when real feelings become involved?

I have a thing for love stories in which the guy has harbored a years-long crush on the girl while she remains endearingly clueless (don't worry, I'm not giving anything away — it's pretty obvious from the start how Adam feels about Olive), and so I knew by Olive and Adam's second interaction that I would LOVE this book. Olive is smart, ambitious, and funny, Adam is tender and thoughtful, and together their connection is pure slow-burning gold with lots of chemistry (both the literal and figurative kind).

Their connection is pure slow-burning gold with lots of chemistry (both the literal and figurative kind).

This is Hazelwood's debut novel, but she's been writing fan fiction for years. I read that this book was actually based on a previous, and hugely popular, Star Wars fan fiction story she wrote a few years ago. So if you're a Rey and Kylo Ren stan , you should probably read this book. I mean, just look at the cover!

Standout Quote

"His eyes were on her, now. There was light in them that she didn't understand. 'You are not mediocre, Olive. . . And the work you presented is important, rigorous, and brilliant.' He took a deep breath. His shoulders rose and fell in time with the thudding of her heart. 'I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.'"

Get ready to dive into all things academia: the politics, the research, the nerdy banter. It's like a world of its own and reminded me a little of my own college days. This book has some funny antics but doesn't shy away from diving into the more serious side of academia (including sexual harassment).

Where You Should Read It

Snuggled up at a student cafe with a pumpkin spice latte (Olive's drink of choice).

Read This If You Like . . .

Rey and Kylo Ren fanfic, romance stories set in academia like How to Fail at Flirting by Denise Williams , or a fake-dating trope.

POPSUGAR Reading Challenge Prompt(s)

This novel can check off more than one 2021 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge prompt; just pick the one that fits best for you.

• A book that's published in 2021
• A book about a subject you are passionate about
• A book you think your best friend would like

How Long It Takes to Read

The story is 360 pages long, and I read it every spare second I could over a weekend — and then immediately started over again when I finished since I didn't want it to end.

Give This Book to . . .

Friends who love Star Wars or smart and science-y love stories, who work in STEM, or who have ever fantasized about dating that really hot professor from college.

The Sweet Spot Summary

The Love Hypothesis ($14) follows Olive, a PhD student, who fake dates the one professor her peers love to hate: the intimidating (and intimidatingly hot) Dr. Adam Carlsen. She doesn't really believe in love, but if there's anyone who can convince her, it just might be Adam.

Emoji Rating

👩‍🔬 + 👨‍🔬 + 🔬 + 🔥

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The Love Hypothesis

With an exclusive new bonus chapter... from Adam's POV Based on the available information and the data hitherto collected, my hypothesis is that the further I stay away from love, the better off I will be. 'Contemporary romance's unicorn: the elusive marriage of deeply brainy and delightfully escapist.' Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners

Ali hazelwood's latest novel, love on the brain is out now..

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From Friends to Lovers: The Fanfic-to-Romance Pipeline Goes Mainstream

Ali Hazelwood, a New York Times best-selling author of the romance novels The Love Hypothesis , Love on the Brain , and Love, Theoretically , found her literary agent in January 2020 in an unusual way. Instead of the long process most authors undertake that involves sending out countless letters seeking representation, it was an agent who reached out after reading stories Hazelwood had written on Archive of Our Own , a popular fan-fiction site. Her stories focused on a relationship between the saber-crossed Star Wars duo Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker , a pairing often abbreviated to Reylo. Once Hazelwood posted that she was considering reworking her fics to publish them, Thao Le from the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency sent a message encouraging her to submit. They’ve worked together since, and today, Hazelwood’s career comes full circle with the publication of From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi , an official collection of Star Wars short stories that includes one by her.

That pathway to representation was an inversion of the one experienced by Lauren Billings and Christina Hobbs almost a decade prior. Back in 2011, the author pair — who publish as Christina Lauren — felt they needed to hide from their agent the fact that they had met while writing Twilight fan fiction. At the time, E.L. James avoided emphasizing that her blockbuster erotic novel, Fifty Shades of Grey , had begun as a Twilight fanfic titled “Masters of the Universe,” which gave Billings and Hobbs the impression that the publishing industry wouldn’t take fan-fiction works as seriously as original content.

When they finally told their agent, Holly Root, she was delighted and took a book based on one of their fics, Beautiful Bastard , to publishing houses. It sold in just 12 hours. The pair have since published nearly 30 novels, and they’ve hit the New York Times best-seller list multiple times.

Once considered a frivolous endeavor undertaken by sex-obsessed amateurs, fan fiction is now fully in fashion, enabling romance writers — and their publishers — to celebrate (and capitalize on) their Archive of Our Own roots. In July, Julie Soto, who writes Harry Potter fan fiction envisioning a relationship between Hermione Granger and Draco Malfoy , published her debut novel, Forget Me Not . The upcoming titles My Roommate Is a Vampire , You, Again , and The Hurricane Wars , as well as multiple 2022 releases , have their origins in Reylo fanfic; so prevalent is that pairing that it’s become a meme in romance fan spaces to imagine Adam Driver walking into a bookstore and seeing himself on the covers of dozens of titles.

Top publishing houses including Hachette, HarperCollins, and Penguin Random House are making a clear push in the space, with proper package and promotional rollouts. Marketing materials have embraced — critics might say too much — fanfic-style tropes such as “enemies to lovers,” “only one bed,” “fake dating,” and “fated mates” that match the tagging system found on Archive of Our Own. (The odder yet nevertheless popular “male pregnancy” trope hasn’t achieved quite as much mainstream traction.) The Love Hypothesis even features fan art on the cover.

The appeal is understandable: Fic writers bring knowledge of how to market a story and build an audience, a boon for editorial houses. The fans authors have gained writing fic will buy books, in some cases carrying them to the best-seller list. For writers who demonstrate a facility for telling a certain kind of story, the process of transitioning into writing traditional books is as much a matter of format and structure as anything else.

Not that those are trivial elements. Romance novels rarely run longer than 100,000 words and typically have a three-act structure. Fan-fiction stories can run hundreds of thousands of words and take a meandering approach to plot. There’s a learning curve. “When you’re writing a romance, there’s a beginning and an end. You have a plot and emotional beats,” explains romance author and fan-fiction reader Adriana Herrera. “With a fic it’s more episodic. There’s a different flow to it.”

Beyond the structural nature of adapting their work, fanfic writers often have to reskin IP-based elements. Some fanfic writers, Hazelwood and Christina Lauren included, rewrite their fics before publishing them. It’s a process known as “filing off the serial numbers,” which involves more than simply changing the names. That’s how Hazelwood’s Reylo fanfic became The Love Hypothesis: While her fic “Head Over Feet” put Kylo and Rey in an academic setting instead of a galaxy far, far away, when it came time to revise the story for book publishing, she also added an antagonist, condensed characters, combined scenes, and raised the stakes with a tight timeline, all changes that gave it a more traditional narrative arc.

Hazelwood describes rewriting her fiction as “harrowing,” explaining that it was far more difficult than writing an original book. Christa Tomlinson, an indie romance writer, says it took her months to transform a fic based on WWE into a story about a SWAT team . Building original characters — their quirks and distinct traits — proved more difficult for her than developing a plot. She chose the law-enforcement world because it allowed her to keep the sense of “camaraderie and brotherhood” from her original fic while moving it out of a wrestling milieu. Some of the plot had to change as a result, though Tomlinson kept the bones of her story the same.

Not all fic writers are benefiting from the boom — yet, at least. Publishers have made some progress diversifying their love stories, but disparities remain. In a dynamic that mirrors traditional publishing, white fic readers don’t widely consume stories about characters of color written by people of color. That leads to fewer opportunities for those writers — even as they embrace the same styles and stories as their white peers. Similarly, queer love stories, especially those featuring two male leads, are wildly popular in fan-fiction libraries, but the Big Five publishing houses haven’t repackaged these stories the same way they did for Hazelwood or Billings and Hobbs.

Those shortcomings notwithstanding, the fan-fiction-to-romance pipeline continues to grow. Earlier this year, the Reylo fandom helped propel books from their favorite fic writers to the top of the Barnes & Noble best-seller list during the store’s annual preorder sale, even with minimal advertising from editorial houses. YA fantasy author Rosamund Hodge promises her upcoming release, What Monstrous Gods , has Reylo vibes . Indie publisher Lake Country Press has built a niche business around publishing Reylo books, including upcoming books Sliding into Love by Juliet Bridges and Katrina Kwan’s Knives, Seasoning and a Dash of Love . Julie Soto promises her next book, Not Another Love Song, will be “familiar” to fanfic readers.

Jen Prokop, romance critic and co-host of the romance podcast Fated Mates , points to Hazelwood as a model for fan-fiction authors looking to publish original works. The Love Hypothesis, she says , is clearly Reylo fan fiction to people who know, but to others, it’s a fun romance featuring two scientists. “Ali is clearly a big romance reader as well as being a fic reader,” she says. “I think part of the reason that she’s such a success is that she knows both fic and the genre.”

Even Hollywood has noticed the trend. Last October, Bisous Pictures, which produced Netflix’s Persuasion adaptation , announced it would be bringing The Love Hypothesis to screens. Fans immediately took to social media to express their hopes — half in jest, half completely serious — that Star Wars co-stars Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley would play the movie’s leads.

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Julia's Bookshelves

Book reviews and book adventures, review: the love hypothesis by ali hazelwood, the tiktok viral book delivers on troupe filled twists and turns..

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

• Buy the book here
• Page count: 384
• Genre: Romance, comedy, contemporary, fiction
• Content warning: Discussions of workplace harassment and assault

Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis has earned the title of being a “BookTok book” through being heavily read and discussed by content creators on TikTok. The romance novel has earned both praise and criticism from the community, with some hailing it for being sweet and funny, and others hating it for feeling cringe.

There’s one obvious trait about the fanfiction that sets it apart from other romance novels: the book has roots in fanfiction. One look at the cover and any Star Wars fan (me, I am the Star Wars fan in question) will immediately notice the cover star characters bear a striking resemblance to two familiar faces. Author Ali Hazelwood has been open about her own start as a writer of fanfic and how this helped start getting her own original work published.

There is a lot of discourse surrounding the value and validity of fanfiction, but I tend to stand with the principle that spaces encouraging new creative writers are a good thing. For those without access to creative writing programs, writing groups, or publishing industry connections, fanfiction websites might be the first place a young writer is able to share their work and receive feedback from readers and other writers.

Ties to fanfiction aside, The Love Hypothesis is an original work with original characters. The story follows Olive, a third-year Ph.D candidate who enters a fake relationship with notoriously brooding professor Adam Carlsen to convince her friend Anh that she’s over another boy in their program.

I read this book in one day. I bought it, brought it to local cafe, and read the whole thing before dinner time. It moved that fast. Each chapter begins with a “hypothesis” that gives a little clue about the action of the chapter. While Olive and Adam start off the book as strangers, the antics of the well meaning Ahn force the two into intimate and often humorous situations that grow the bond between them.

Outside of the romance, the book focuses on misogyny experienced by women in STEM fields and provides a look at the specific challenges that women like Olive face everyday. It was nice to read a lighthearted book that focuses on this issue but also showed the passions and achievements of women in STEM. Ali Hazelwood, who has a STEM background herself , does a nice job portraying of what the experience of women in academia looks like.

This book kept me reading because it does a nice job of growing a genuine connection between the two lead characters. I’ll admit that the story felt a bit absurd at the beginning, but the longer things played out, the more I found myself rooting for Olive and Adam. Hazelwood’s best moments in this story are the lighthearted and comedic ones where she leans into the fact that this story is cheesy and goofy.

There’s a nice inkling of self-awareness in the book, too. Olive seems pretty aware that she’s living out the plot of a steamy romance movie, even quipping once that she and Adam will likely end up experiencing the classic “one bed” romance troupe if she agree to share a hotel room with him.

If you’ve read my discussion of Vampire Academy, you’ll know that I am tired of stories about power imbalance relationships , specifically those between older men and younger women. Although Adam is not Olive’s direct supervisor and they do not work together, he still holds a high position in the department where she is a candidate. I was frustrated that this book once again represented an unrealistic desirability of dating one’s superior. Powerful and strong women do not need to date older men with higher positions to “meet their match”. It would’ve been simple for this story to take place between two Ph.D. candidates.

Power dynamics aside, there is one thing in this book that I just cannot get past: the recurring Title IX jokes. For a book that makes a point to tackle sexism and harassment of women in the STEM fields, I am surprised by the jokes about Olive and Adam reporting each other to HR. Sexual harassment of women in academia continues to be an issue, and it felt in poor taste that these jokes were included in the story.

It has been a long time since I have read a happy romance novel. I can say this: I had fun reading The Love Hypothesis . The overall story provided a funny, if unrealistic, get-together between two characters who could not be more different from one another.

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