Craft Corner: Writing Effective Banter
Since my Heated Rivalry obsession isn't going away anytime soon, I decided that if I'm going to watch it, I might as well be productive while doing so. So here's one thing I learned about writing from watching Heated Rivalry for the [redacted] time. Consider this a spoiler warning for Season 1.
If you want alcohol poisoning, take a shot every time Ilya calls Shane "boring" or Shane calls Ilya an "asshole."
But these insults are actually needs disguised as barbs.
What makes it effective: The insults are things the other person craves.
Ilya comes from a dysfunctional family, so Shane's "boringness" is the stability he desperately wants. For Shane, who's spent his whole life as the golden boy, the responsible one, the role model for every Asian/Asian-Canadian kid out there, Ilya being an asshole to him: A) makes him feel normal, and B) gives him permission to be less than Mr. Perfect.
This means every barb is specific. They're not throwing random insults at each other. Each one is personal to the characters, which makes the banter feel real.
How I Applied This to DDDC
This week, while revising DDDC (my YA romcom), I spent a lot of time amping up the bantering moments between my two MCs. Fortunately, I already had the framework in the manuscript. It was just a matter of teasing those moments out and making them more specific.
Meet Silas: He's impulsive. His whole family operates on a "we'll figure it out" energy, which directly impacts the A-story (saving his family's food forest, which has been neglected since his father died).
But on a deeper level, Silas is displaying avoidance masquerading as flexibility. He's not actually chill. He's decided that if he doesn't plan for things, he can't be disappointed when they fall apart. He's been burned by things he couldn't control (like his dad's death), so he's stopped trying to control anything.
But what he's actually craving? Someone who will take control.
Enter Beck: As the son of a late, legendary celebrity chef, Beck wants to control everything. He's meticulous, fastidious, loves to color-code. But he's not actually a control freak. He's terrified of things going wrong. Because when things go wrong in his life, they go wrong publicly. Every mistake gets documented, criticized, turned into content. So he over-prepares, over-organizes, and tries to control every variable.
But what he's actually craving? Permission to let go. To fuck things up without it being a referendum on his worth.
So that's where the banter comes from. While working together, they approach every problem from completely opposite ends of the spectrum. This causes them to tease each other, to clash, and to create setbacks. And those setbacks are directly linked to each of their core wounds.
The payoff: by working through those conflicts and compromising, they come out stronger. Both as individuals and as a couple.
Good banter isn't just witty dialogue. It's:
Specific to the characters (not generic insults)
Rooted in their wounds (what they're actually afraid of)
Disguised as what they need (the thing they crave but won't admit)
When your characters' insults reveal what they secretly need from each other, the banter becomes character development, instead of simply entertainment.
