Playing Matchmaker: The Art of Writing a Good Couple

by Andrea Lundgren

I’ve been dealing with writing romance lately. Not the genre but the plot component, the seemingly inescapable phenomenon that crops up when writing fantasy, science-fiction, historical fiction, and just about any other genre, provided you have a few single characters floating around.

And I’ve written about how authors can woefully get a romance wrong before, and about a writer’s recipe to marrying off the wrong couples. Making a good, solid match isn’t easy, because we authors often have a lot on our minds, especially if our novel isn’t primarily or solely a romance. We’re thinking about the rest of the plot, the villains, the action or adventure. We don’t have that much time to worry about which character is right for whom…and why.