It’s been five years since America met and fell in love with Hannah Brown. First introduced as a contestant on Colton Underwood’s season of The Bachelor before becoming the lead on The Bachelorette, she’s now helping two people on their own journey — literally — to find love in her debut novel, Mistakes We Never Made.
The book follows the romance between type-A Emma Townsend and “walking red flag” Finn Hughes, two former high school rivals who have a long history of almost getting together but never following through for one reason or another. When the pair is sent on a road trip to track down a runaway bride, they can’t help but revisit their past and the multitude of obstacles that have gotten in the way.
It marks Brown’s first foray into fiction. She published a memoir, God Bless This Mess, in 2021.
“It made sense for me to tell my story [then], because that’s what people wanted more at that time,” she told Yahoo Entertainment.
But as time went by, she felt ready to make the transition and try her hand at writing fiction. “I [didn’t want] to be seen as one-dimensional, like someone who comes on your screen just to make you laugh or to be ‘relatable,’” she explained, adding that over the past few years, “I’ve been showing different sides of myself and more of what I’m into.”
Brown said the idea of writing a novel was intimidating, not only because she had many other projects in the works but also with regard to the complicated logistics baked into the book’s central premise. “Could Emma and Finn actually get to Vegas and back to Malibu? What is the timing of that? You have to plot that out to see if it even makes sense,” she said.
She also appreciated the challenge that came with writing a romance given the parameters of the genre. “There’s always going to be a happily ever after,” she said, “but how we get there [has to] still be interesting and exciting, even though we all know what we’re getting at the end.”
She cites Taylor Jenkins Reid and Rebecca Serle, two authors who’ve written many kinds of love stories and dabbled in different fiction genres, as inspirations for how to think more creatively about the journey she takes her characters on.
While Brown’s fans from Bachelor Nation and beyond may try to parse who swoony love interest Finn is based on from her own love life, she’s quick to clarify that he’s a combination of many different people — and a little bit of herself — as opposed to a single person.
“I’ve never experienced a Finn [in real life],” she said. “It was very interesting, because [as an author] you want him to be a dreamboat guy, but there has to be something about him that has not made this [relationship with Emma] work out.”
She also wove her own experiences with not knowing how to handle what she called her “big emotions” into the character to give him more depth.
With Mistakes We Never Made recently released, Brown is already plotting out her literary future, which includes at least one more romance novel as part of a two-book deal.
She hopes to eventually have four books set in the same universe as Mistakes We Never Made, with each following one of the four main women featured in the story.
And who knows? Maybe Emma, Finn and their merry band of misfits will show up in a film or television adaptation one day.
“I can just see it on a screen so well,” Brown said.
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