NEED TO KNOW
- New York Times bestselling author Abby Jimenez recently revealed to fans that the first drafts of her eight books were written on her phone
- In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Jimenez says that when readers online found out about her writing process, they “were either just disgusted by the idea of writing a book on a phone, or it opened their mind”
- The Just for the Summer author adds that some of her most famous scenes were written while she was in line at the grocery store or floating on a lake
Toni Morrison famously drafted her books in pencil on a yellow legal pad, and now a romance author’s modern answer to the writing process is dividing the internet.
New York Times bestselling author Abby Jimenez tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview that it “really shook the internet” when she revealed to her nearly 1 million TikTok followers that she writes all the first drafts for her books on her phone.
“I think people, they had two reactions to that. They were either just disgusted by the idea of writing a book on a phone, or it opened their mind and they were like, ‘Wait, there’s no rules. You can do it however is organic for you,’ ” The Friend Zone author says.
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“Here’s the thing. I didn’t go to college,” she continues. “I didn’t have any formal education when it came to writing. I took creative writing in high school. This was a hobby for me. I wasn’t doing it for anybody else. So for that reason, I just did what felt natural to me and what felt organic to me. And what is natural and organic to me is to write wherever I am.”
She points out that she isn’t exactly texting her drafts to herself. “I write on a Google Doc, so it’s not like I’m putting it in a Notes app, you know what I mean?” she added.
Jimenez, who recently partnered with Sonic and nonprofit First Book to help provide books to young readers, explains that she first writes in the Google Docs app on her phone, which saves the manuscript automatically for her to access on her laptop. Later drafts are written on her computer for easier collaboration with her editors.
“It just gives me the freedom to write wherever I’m feeling creative,” the Food Network champion explains.
“Some of my most iconic scenes, some of my most iconic lines have been created on my cell phone,” she adds, citing an internal monologue about “how love exists in the folds of everyday life” from Justin in Just for the Summer.
“I came up with that at the grocery store in the line with my husband,” she reveals.
“He was bagging the groceries and I was just watching him and I was thinking, ‘This is what real love is. This is it,'” Jimenez says. “It’s not the moonlit walks, it’s not the romance music playing or the candlelit dinners. It’s this. It’s being with somebody in the mundane moments, them bagging the groceries so that you don’t have to do it … And I stood in the line and I wrote that down, and that’s one of the most quoted passages in any of my books ever.”
“Just write, do what feels good for you. There are no rules,” she concludes.
She’s also looked up some interesting research elements on that same phone — probably impacting her Google search results in possibly NSFW ways.
“I had to Google how to take a good d— pic for the ring light [scene in] Part of Your World,” Jimenez says, laughing.
“I got married before the Internet age,” she adds. “I never had to do online dating. I never had to dive into the art of taking a d— pic or receiving a d— pic or [figuring out] what is a good d— pic to get. I don’t know! So I had to research that, and I did that on my phone, floating in a lake in Minnesota during the summer.”
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Jimenez’s latest summer romance, Say You’ll Remember Me, is available now wherever books are sold.
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