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KJ Charles’s Trick to Make Historical Settings and Romantic Chemistry Come Alive

KJ Charles’s Trick to Make Historical Settings and Romantic Chemistry Come Alive

A Thief in the Night by KJ Charles is a warming, laughter-filled romance about a thief and the earl he robs on the road one evening—oops!—and what happens after they bump into each other again. Filled with Charles’s signature witty turns of phrase and fully drawn characters, it’s an easy listen for anyone looking to take in a story that will put a smile on their face. We asked Charles for some behind-the-scenes intel on how it all came together.

Audible: You are so well-known for your snarky characters and clever dialogue. How do you situate yourself inside the heads of your characters and write your signature dialogue?

KJ Charles: A good way to dig into a character is to ask: What do they want? What’s their immediate goal, the one they’d tell people about, and why do they want to achieve it? More importantly, what do they really want, deep down, even if they couldn’t admit it? And—related—where does it hurt? And what happens if I prod there?

For example, Miles in Thief thinks he wants to find his lost family fortune. But what he really wants is to turn back time and restore his relationship with his dead father. And that’s a mess of guilt and regret, and there’s nothing he can do to fix it. And now he’s alone in a big empty house, and it turns out that everything comes back to the hole inside him that he’s been trying to fill with drink or dice or action all his life … into which Toby steps with both feet.

I love writing dialogue, particularly people being smart-arsed. You could pretty much get away with anything in my family home if you were sufficiently clever or funny about it (this explains a lot about me), and one of my touchstones for a good relationship is being able to laugh with the other person. If my characters are working as a pair, they will make each other laugh, even (especially?) when they might not want to.

You also work a lot with historical settings. Tell us about the methods you use to bring the past to life in your romances, and why you love writing historical romance.

It’s easy to overdo a historical setting and weigh the book down with research. The trick is to make the details serve the story, so they’re there for a reason—not just background but mood, sense of place, casting light on a character, or forwarding the plot. I tend to find, whenever I start researching, that there will be a couple of historical facts that leap to life and give me keys to the book. I’m not saying which fact in this story (because ... spoilers!) but a law, or a new piece of infrastructure, or an industry, or a curiosity of historical weather can absolutely drive a book.

I find writing historicals far easier than contemporaries, possibly because I’m not a very up-to-date person. I grew up on Georgette Heyer, and I really enjoy playing with the tropes of historical romance but with more inclusive casts and sordid realities to ground them.

In A Thief in the Night, Toby and Miles both have complicated relationships with their fathers. What did you want to explore with each of their father-son dynamics?

Toby is actually the stepbrother of a hero of another book of mine, The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting. In that book, we learn only that he fled their violent father and disappeared. (One of the reasons I was keen to write this was to find out what happened to him.) Toby’s father was an irredeemable jerk, and Toby has long come to terms with that and stopped caring. Whereas Miles’s father was deeply troubled, and not a great father, but there was a lot of love there even if it went wrong. Miles is consumed with regrets he can’t mend, where Toby shrugs it all away, as he shrugs away a lot of the bad things that have happened in his life. Which makes you wonder: Is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? I don’t know. Digging into things like that is one reason I write.

Did you have a favorite moment or scene from A Thief in the Night that you thought was especially fun to write?

I particularly liked their second encounter. The first time they meet, Toby seduces and then robs Miles on the road. The second time, Toby is posing as the Earl of Arvon’s new valet come from London, only to discover that the Earl of Arvon is—oops—Miles. How they both react to this tells the listener a great deal about how their story is going to develop, and it was highly entertaining to play out.

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