Kevin on Kraft: When Your Characters Stop Following Instructions

I missed an episode last week.

I could offer excuses, but the truth is more interesting: I’ve been writing. A lot.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been almost embarrassingly absorbed in The Chemistry Between Us, the first romance novel I’ll publish as Devon Marin. Riley and Leo, the two people at the center of the story, have been carrying on conversations in my head while I’m trying to do other things. I’ve forgotten to eat. I’ve awakened early because I needed to capture something they were saying. I’ve even found myself mildly annoyed that the human body insists on bathroom breaks.

Before Kevin and I got into our conversation, I talked a little about that experience and why I think it belongs on The Alignment Show.

This isn’t primarily a show about writing. It’s about pursuing what matters to you. Writing happens to be one of the things that matter deeply to me. Whatever your thing is, I think there’s something worth noticing about those moments when you become so engaged with meaningful work that you’re no longer merely being productive. You’re curious. Engaged. Alive.

Speaking of curious, if you happen to be curious about The Chemistry Between Us, you can read an excerpt and sign up for a chance to receive an early copy before publication at DonnKing.com/Chemistry. It costs you nothing to check it out.

And all of that turned out to be a pretty good setup for this week’s conversation with Kevin Tumlinson, another entry in the “Kevin on Kraft” series.

Big Takeaway

Characters become interesting when we stop treating them as collections of information and start understanding how they behave.

Kevin and I talked about the strange experience writers sometimes have when characters begin making choices we hadn’t planned. But we also got very practical about what creates that illusion of life on the page: consistency, meaningful details, leaving room for the reader’s imagination, and being willing to discover things during the writing process, and then go back and plant what the story needs.

Maybe the larger creative lesson is that discovery and craft aren’t opposites. Sometimes discovery gives us the raw material, and craft lets us go back and make it look as though we knew what we were doing all along.

In This Conversation