📝 Paula Hawkins’ Writing Routine

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Before she became synonymous with the psychological thriller, Paula Hawkins was writing Christmas romances under the pseudonym Amy Silver. The titles—All I Want for Christmas, Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista—didn’t exactly scream Hitchcockian suspense. “Romantic comedy was not my genre at all,” she told Longreads. “As I went through writing these books, they kept getting darker and darker. And more and more terrible things kept happening to everybody in the books.”

Hawkins’ pivot to crime fiction wasn’t part of a master plan. It was practical. She was broke. In her thirties, after years working as a financial journalist at The Times, Hawkins needed to make fiction work—or move on. “I needed some money,” she said to Goodreads. “So I wrote the first half [of The Girl on the Train] really quickly, and I think a lot of that desperation is in the text.”

That desperation worked. The novel—published in 2015—became a global phenomenon. It sold over 20 million copies, drew comparisons to Gone Girl, and got the Hollywood treatment, with Emily Blunt in the lead role. Even Stephen King tweeted about it. Hawkins, who had quietly been grinding through freelance journalism and ghostwritten novels, was suddenly the face of a genre.

Still, she doesn’t see herself as someone who “always knew” she’d be a novelist. “I don’t think I really considered it as a career prospect,” she told Longreads. “So I went into journalism. But I always did write things on the side… It wasn’t until my thirties that I actually, properly considered doing it for real.”

Born in Zimbabwe in 1972, Hawkins moved to London with her family as a teenager. She studied PPE at Oxford, started in business reporting, and later freelanced for various financial outlets. The romantic fiction came later, when a publisher offered her a gig under a pseudonym. It paid the bills. It also taught her the mechanics of writing a novel. “What was great about writing those books… was that I got some training in novel writing with a bit of distance,” she said. “Because I was writing under a pseudonym, it didn’t feel quite so personal.”

But personal work was always calling. The inspiration for The Girl on the Train began during her daily commute through southwest London. From her train seat, she’d stare into people’s homes and wonder about the lives behind the windows. “I thought about the lives of the people who lived in those flats… They would be young and bohemian and interesting. They went to gigs and art galleries, they read books by French philosophers, they had good-looking boyfriends who played in bands. I wanted to be them,” she wrote in Writing.ie.

Rachel, the alcoholic protagonist of The Girl on the Train, started as a voice—a character Hawkins had imagined for a different, never-finished novel. When she put Rachel on the train, something clicked. “She came storming out almost fully formed, with all her bitterness and longing, all her regrets and recriminations,” Hawkins wrote.

The novel captured something zeitgeisty: the unreliability of memory, the claustrophobia of suburbia, and the invisible weight of female domestic expectations. “Motherhood did become a big part of it—people’s decisions about having children or not… And I did consciously take all three characters out of work because I wanted them to feel slightly confined,” she told Goodreads. “[That] made them very inward looking… and that is what the book is about.”

Her characters—Rachel, Megan, Anna—were complicated, wounded, and often unlikeable. “Everybody in this book behaves pretty badly,” Hawkins admitted. “But I am catching everyone at a bad moment.”

That blend of literary ambition and commercial pacing became her calling card. She reads Margaret Atwood and Pat Barker, admires Kate Atkinson’s ability to straddle genre and literary fiction, and cites Donna Tartt’s The Secret History as the novel that “opened my eyes to the possibility of the psychological thriller.” She wants her books to be both page-turning and well-crafted. “Of course I would like my books to have literary value as well as commercial value,” she told Longreads. “That’s what I strive for.”

Still, success hasn’t made the writing easier. If anything, it’s done the opposite.

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