Inside the Writing Process: Crafting Angie & Keith’s Complicated Love
There are certain relationships that linger long after they end — not because they were healthy, but because they were formative. They shape how we love, how we react, what we tolerate, and what we begin to expect from ourselves. When I began writing Right Pieces, Wrong Man, I knew I wanted to explore the kind of relationship that doesn’t fall neatly into the categories of “good” or “bad,” but instead lives in the hazy, complicated, deeply human space in between.
Angie and Keith were created from that space, where ambition and hope intersects with longing and self worth. In this space love feels heavy, but leaving feels impossible.
As I wrote their story, I recognized early on that this wouldn’t be the traditional romance structure, nor would it center the kind of love that sweeps a woman off her feet. Instead, it would examine the kind of love that slowly reshapes a woman, bit by bit, until she finally recognizes how much of herself she has been giving away.
The Invitation Into Angie’s Mind
Writing from Angie’s point of view meant accessing a truth many women know intimately: the tension between what we say we deserve and what we allow ourselves to endure. She is successful, brilliant, and emotionally generous — the kind of woman who believes she has the power to nurture any situation into success. But that same gift becomes a trap when the relationship she’s in consistently asks her to shrink.
My goal was never to make her a victim but make her honest. Through her honesty about why she was willing to sacrifice so much of herself, I knew she would be relatable to many. This emotional honesty explores her lack of belief that she could have better, and her inability to honor that she deserved better.
Writing her emotions required stillness, not just narratively, but in my own process. I had to sit with the heaviness, write through her internal justifications, and allow her to be complex, layered, and flawed. Angie isn’t perfect. She makes decisions that will frustrate readers. She ignores signs that are painfully obvious…and that’s exactly what makes her feel real.
Understanding Keith: A Man Written With Purpose
Keith was perhaps the most challenging character to write because of what he represents. He is a man who is both caring and careless, ambitious yet insecure, affectionate but self-serving. Usually, those contradictions are wrapped in a package that looks polished on the outside.
Men like Keith don’t walk into a story as villains. They walk in as love interests, with pieces that readers will love and at times have empathy for, even if it is against their will.
But as the layers peel back, the shortcomings of these types of men — often rooted in ego, unhealed wounds, entitlement or a combination of all three — begin to cloud everything around them. Writing Keith required careful balance. He couldn’t be written as a monster; he had to be written as a humanly flawed man. Keith has dreams, talents, a love for family and a fragile sense of self that cracks under pressure.
To make a character like Keith believable, I had to allow him to be both magnetic and maddening. He had to be someone a woman like Angie would plausibly love, and also someone she would eventually outgrow. His charisma had to coexist with his inconsistency. And his affection had to coexist with his neglect.
He had to be the kind of man who inspires emotional chaos and not through intentional harm, but through his own lack of emotional responsibility.
The Dance Between Love and Disillusionment
One of the most unique aspects of writing this book was navigating the emotional timeline of Angie’s unraveling. Her journey isn’t marked by one explosive moment, but by a series of small erosions. These are the moments that many women overlook or excuse:
The quiet dismissal of her needs
The growing comfort with accepting his assumptions
The subtle entitlement to her time, body, and presence
These aren’t moments that begin loudly, but typically end explosively, and that contrast is at the heart of Angie and Keith’s dynamic.
Building Emotional Authenticity
Portraying a relationship like Angie and Keith’s demands nuance. It demands a willingness to sit inside the discomfort of choices that make sense emotionally but not logically. It demands a fearless examination of the parts of ourselves we often keep hidden — the insecurities, the longing for validation, the fear of starting over, the desire to be chosen fully.
Writing this dynamic required three foundational elements:
1. Compassion for both characters
Even when Keith’s flaws surfaced, he couldn’t be written as someone beyond redemption. And even when Angie faltered, she couldn’t be written as someone weak. Compassion creates depth — and depth is what turns characters into mirrors.
2. Honesty about emotional labor
Many women know the exhaustion of carrying a relationship emotionally, but we rarely see it articulated with the fullness it deserves. Angie’s experience invites women to name what they’ve carried silently.
3. Permission to evolve
The evolution of their relationship isn’t tidy. It isn’t linear. But it is necessary — and the writing had to honor that.
Why Their Story Resonates
Angie and Keith’s relationship is not a cautionary tale — it is an emotional portrait. I know what it feels like to love someone deeply while slowly losing pieces of yourself in the process. That comes with heartbreak that doesn’t come from betrayal alone, but from the realization that you’ve outgrown someone you once imagined was your forever.
Readers will see themselves in Angie not because they share her circumstances, but because they share her emotional truth. And they see pieces of men they’ve loved in Keith: the charming parts, the disappointing parts, and the parts they hoped would one day change.
Writing their complicated love story wasn’t about painting a villain and a hero. It was about painting a woman finding her way back to herself.
A woman who learns that choosing herself isn’t selfish — it’s necessary.
And that is the heart of Right Pieces, Wrong Man.
