04 Aug. How to Write Chemistry Between Characters (5 Things I Always Do)
1. Give them something to resist, not just something to want
Attraction on the page is flat if there’s nothing pushing against it. In The Walls We Break, Cole and Savannah aren’t just attracted to each other. T%hey have every reason not to act on it: her brother, his rules, her secrets, his damage. Chemistry gets its charge from friction. Before you write a single charged scene, ask what your characters are actively trying not to feel, and why. The resistance is what makes the giving-in mean something.
2. Let them notice the wrong things
Real attraction rarely announces itself as „he was so handsome.“ It shows up sideways. A character noticing the way someone sets down a tool, or closes a door, or the specific quiet way they take up space in a room. Specific, slightly-too-detailed noticing does more work than any physical description. If your character is cataloguing details they have no reason to be cataloguing, the reader feels the pull before you’ve said a word about it.
3. Write the conversation underneath the conversation
The best charged scenes are rarely about what’s being said. Two characters can talk about nothing — coffee, weather, a shared chore — while everything unspoken sits underneath it. Give your dialogue a subtext track: what does each character actually mean, and what are they choosing not to say instead? Chemistry lives in that gap.
4. Use proximity and interruption on purpose
Chemistry needs bodies in a room together, close enough that avoiding each other becomes its own kind of tension. Small towns are a gift for this, because its shared spaces, run-ins that can’t be avoided, everyone already knowing everyone’s business. But you don’t need a small-town setting to use it: force your characters into proximity for a real, plot-driven reason, then let the awareness of each other’s physical presence do quiet work in every scene they share.
5. Make the stakes personal, not just romantic
The couples readers remember aren’t just attracted to each other. They’re each other’s exception to a rule they’ve built their life around. Cole doesn’t let anyone in; Savannah is the one person who reaches him anyway. That’s not chemistry as decoration. That’s chemistry as characterization. It tells you who these people are by showing you what breaks their usual pattern.
The through-line
If there’s one thing all five of these have in common, it’s this: chemistry isn’t built by telling the reader two characters are attracted to each other. It’s built by making the reader do the work of noticing it themselves, scene by scene, in the gap between what’s said and what’s felt.
If you want to see this in practice, The Walls We Break is a good case study for exactly this. Cole and Savannah spend most of the book actively trying not to want each other, which is precisely why it works.
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