With twenty-one New York Times bestselling romance novels, Lauren Billings ’96 seems destined to have become a writer. But, once upon a time, Billings had a very different career: she held a doctorate in neuroscience and studied neurodegeneration in aging.
“I really loved writing, but I just thought that it was going to be my hobby forever,” she says. “I was super happy in my science career, but then I had this dream I’ve always wanted dangled in front of me.”
Before her life as one half of acclaimed writing duo Christina Lauren, Billings was a principal scientist researching cognition, pain, and retinal degeneration at pharmaceutical company AbbVie (then Allergan). Helping solidify her path to neuroscience were behavioral psych classes at Mac and a monthlong shadowing program at a local inpatient mental health facility.
Learning about the intricacies of the brain and how mental illnesses are treated became a particular passion. So the decision to leave the fascinating and fulfilling neuroscience career she’d built for thirteen years wasn’t easy. But momentum had been building since she and her writing partner, Christina Hobbs, secured their first book deal with Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in 2012. Once their first six books all hit the New York Times list in 2013, Billings made the decision to embrace writing full time.
With the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series books all certified New York Times bestsellers, BookTok’s (TikTok’s devoted “book club” of sorts) swooning for Love and Other Words during the pandemic-era romance novel boom, consistent placements on end-of-the-year-best lists from Goodreads to Audible, and a Netflix adaptation of In A Holidaze this fall—it’s an understatement to say her choice paid off.
“As somebody who had written her whole life for pleasure and joy, the idea that I could now do this for a living and support my family felt like a dream,” says Billings, who lives in California. “I thought, ‘I can’t not take this opportunity,’ and it’s been the best decision.”
Ironically, Billings believes her choice in undergrad to pursue neuroscience over creative writing gave her the very thing that led her to her current career: permission to stay playful.
“I think if I had taken some creative writing courses, I might have taken myself too seriously. I just get to have fun with it.”
And if she hadn’t just had some fun writing fanfiction in her free time—Billings’ fandoms of choice: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Alias—she might not have ever met her beloved writing partner, Hobbs.
Fanfiction, a hobby in which fans write their own stories about characters from their favorite pieces of media, provided Billings a creative outlet during the stress of being a new mother. In 2009, she met Hobbs, who lives in Utah, on FanFiction.net, an online forum. That summer, a grad school friend who directed Comic-Con programming invited Billings to organize a panel on fanfiction. Billings invited Hobbs to San Diego—and it was love at first sight. Three days later, they decided to write their first story together inspired by Twilight, and it received rave reviews in the fandom.
“People loved it, and we’re like, ‘This was kind of good. Should we try and write a book?’” Billings recalls.
Learning to co-write came with some growing pains. While the original plan was an even 50/50 split, the two discovered some speed bumps—different writing speeds, preferences, and specific skills. After seventeen years of practice, Billings now describes the process like “building one of those super layered cakes.”
“We’ll outline the book together, and Christina will do what we call the ‘trash draft’—which is almost free association: she doesn’t think about if it reads beautifully at that point; it’s about getting everything out,” Billings explains. “Then I come in and write the polished draft, and then she edits that, and we layer.”
Their transition from fanfiction to established coauthors is a story they’re fearless about sharing, in contrast to the conventional publishing-industry wisdom that writers who want to be seen as legitimate should keep quiet about their fanfiction. The reality, Billings says, is that “for some authors, their fandom platform is what literally sells their books.”
She and Hobbs, who now mostly write romance, are also eager to dispel the notion that romance as a genre is “frivolous.” For one, a sector written primarily by women for women is the highest-selling genre in fiction—“It basically keeps publishing doors open,” she notes. But what Billings finds most compelling is the genre’s “very quiet power.”
“The wonderful thing about it is that you can do a lot of really powerful work because you promise the reader this happily-ever-after at the end,” she explains. “You can explore issues of sexual identity, gender identity, class, race, culture, and so many other things because you are promised that soft landing.”
Of course, that soft landing available in romance isn’t always available in real life—but Billings credits her Mac education with helping her find the courage to dive in anyway. “Because I went in with the mentality of ‘I am not one thing’ at Mac, I knew I didn’t have to be pigeonholed as a scientist—why couldn’t I be a writer?” she says. “There was no reason I couldn’t be both.”
And for up-and-coming writers? “What is the book that you really wish you could stumble upon on the shelf?” Billings asks. “That’s the book that you need to write because it’s what your heart and soul are seeking.”
