How to Write Great Chemistry
For colleagues, friends, lovers, and everything in between
Let’s talk about chemistry! This post will be particularly useful if you’re writing romance or have a romance strand within your plot, but actually, whatever you’re writing, as long as you have characters who need to interact and build relationships of some kind, you will need good chemistry.
We definitely want to see chemistry building between love interests, but we also want to see a platonic version of it between friends, between colleagues – and a lack of chemistry between enemies or characters who don’t get on. If you have, say, a team of detectives, we want to understand what makes them work together as a team – what makes them greater than the sum of their parts, what makes them push each other to understand new things about the case or solve clues. Perhaps you have friends going on a road trip together and learning new things about one another along the way – or want to use their knowledge of how the other ticks to show the depth of their relationship. This is all about chemistry.
And chemistry is hard! You can’t force it, just like in real life. It’s either there – or it isn’t. It’s one of those things in writing where we know when it’s working, and we know when it’s not, but it’s hard to see exactly what’s missing when the sparks aren’t quite flying as they should be. But here are some tricks you can keep in mind to help you kindle a spark that can grow into a flame.
