‘I hate you! Or… do I?’ Five tips for writing an enemies to lovers arc 

‘Tale as old as time, true as it can be / Barely even friends, then somebody bends unexpectedly…’  

Yes, I’m probably showing my age here – and yes, you can quibble over whether Beauty & The Beast is a true enemies to lovers story (it’s arguably a dark romance with shades of Stockholm syndrome). The fact remains that enemies to lovers – the trope that sees two people who intensely dislike each other fall deeply in love – remains one of readers’ all-time favourites. And for very good reason… 

Enemies to lovers stories are, by their nature, tense, dynamic and exciting. Characters must move from one way of thinking – and feeling – to another that’s diametrically opposite where they began. They have significant distance to travel and a whole gamut of emotions to navigate along the way. In the hands of a skilled author, that journey can be gloriously entertaining – not least because friction between characters sparks chemistry, as well as conflict.  

So how do you make sure your enemies to lovers arc soars convincingly from ‘never’ to ‘forever’? How do you hook readers with hate, then encourage them to invest in true love? Here, I offer five tips that should help you.  

1. Consider the reasons for conflict

You need to establish your characters’ status quo before you shake it up. Why do they dislike one another, and how deeply rooted is their enmity?  

In a story with fantasy, speculative or sci-fi elements, this might be straightforward. Perhaps your characters are on opposite sides in a war for territory in space – or it could be that one is a witch hunter, while the other possesses forbidden magic and is trying to evade capture.  

Scenarios like these are fertile ground for enemies to lovers plots and tend to have high stakes – reasons for the reader to care – baked in. The fate of a civilisation might be on the line, or one protagonist’s life might be at risk if the other turns them in. 

In a real-life setting, the reasons for dislike between characters may be more subtle, and you’ll have to work harder to make that conflict matter. Perhaps your protagonists are long-term work rivals, political opponents or live life according to wildly different values. Finances, careers or reputations might be at risk, depending on the circumstances. 

It could be that your characters loathe each other after a disastrous first encounter – a ‘meet-hate’, if you will. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – originally titled First Impressions – Mr Darcy acts the pompous snob, but he also bruises Lizzy’s ego by referring to her as merely ‘tolerable’. This sets the stage for deepening dislike, in a great example of how brief moments can spark major misunderstandings. Now primed to dislike Darcy, Lizzy believes every awful thing she hears about him until she’s forced to think again. 

2. Shape your characters carefully  

Character is king in any great story. In an enemies to lovers novel, you need to design protagonists whose preconceptions and past wounds prevent them from seeing each other clearly. 

Ideally, the qualities of one character should trigger a strong, negative response in the other – probably one that’s rooted in the ‘mirror effect’. If Character A seems careless and irresponsible, for example, ultra-cautious Character B will likely disapprove – but is this simply because they wish they could live more freely?  

Considering this sort of dovetailing when you first design your characters is key to making an enemies to lovers arc work. It’s the complementary nature of the differences between your protagonists that will lead them to better understanding of themselves, opening the way for feelings they’d never have imagined possible. 

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3. Shove them together somehow  

Some kind of forced proximity is crucial in an enemies to lovers story, because you’re dealing with people who wouldn’t breathe the same air as one another unless forced to. As an author, you have to fashion the circumstances that will bring them – believably! – together.  

In the witch hunter / secret magic story mentioned above, perhaps the hunter’s beloved little sister is dying and only an illicit spell can save her. In a contemporary romcom, it could be that two colleagues find themselves in charge of a crucial work project – and if they don’t pull it off, their firm will fold.  

Whatever the situation, your characters’ loathing of one another should be outweighed by the advantage of working together. Suddenly, they’re no longer enemies but reluctant allies – reliant on one another to achieve a goal and pushed into problem-solving as a team. 

This stage of your story offers abundant opportunities for building romantic and sexual tension, as well as including lots of witty banter – crucial if you’re writing a romcom. 

4. Plan your plot, but overlay emotion 

The road from enemies to lovers is paved with moments of realisation – revelations that show the characters they might be wrong about one another. The devotion the witch hunter shows his younger sister might humanise him, for example. Or perhaps it turns out the devil-may-care heroine in a contemporary romance is a chaos demon because she had an unstable childhood.  

Your characters might discover they have certain things in common or find themselves sharing secrets they’d normally keep locked down. Each should have traits and vulnerabilities the other would never have suspected – and every discovery should narrow the distance between them, encouraging empathy and admiration.  

Each shift in your protagonists’ thinking should be driven by plot. You need to create a sequence of events that have emotional side-effects if you want your characters’ changing feelings to seem realistic. Incidents such as getting stuck in a lift together, being held up by armed bandits or having to stand up to a bully can be revealing – prompting everyone involved to think a little differently afterwards.  

Eventually, there’ll come a point when your characters finally accept they don’t loathe one other – a-fork-in-the road moment that might involve a physical encounter or vital emotional support. If you’re writing from two points of view, characters’ realisation of their true feelings might come at different times, deepening the tension. 

5. Earn the ending

Finally, your characters need to profess their love for each other – but not before they’ve vanquished whatever force was pushing them apart, or casting them as enemies, to start with.  

In contemporary fiction, your characters will need to deal with whatever fatal flaw you gifted them at the start of your novel – the problem that, via the mirror effect, drove them to hate their former enemy.  

In a high-stakes sci-fi or romantasy story, it might be that there’s a choice to be made: betrayal of a former mentor in favour of new love, or rejection of a whole belief system.  

Whatever kind of story you’re writing, your characters need to have changed – and their individual growth should be what makes a romantic relationship between them possible.  

Want to learn more about writing romance? Join Sunday Times best-seller Rowan Coleman on our Writing Romance Novels course and learn how to create a compelling, emotionally immersive love story.