Karla Sorensen on the Why of Characters, Writing Craft, and the Body of the Writer

What lives in a writer becomes what lives on the page.

There’s a moment in this conversation where I called Karla Sorensen the Michelangelo of romance, the way he described carving figures out of the marble, the way he said go, walk once they finally appeared. I was reaching for an image that fit what Karla had just described about her own creative process. She paused, then said: “Yeah, that feels pretty accurate.”

That moment encapsulated what the writing process can look like.

If you’ve spent any time in the world of contemporary romance, you may have come across Karla’s books already. She’s published more than thirty novels (Lessons in Heartbreak, Single Dad Dilemma, Best Laid Plans, The Best of All, and How Not to Fall in Love among them), set largely inside the world of professional football, which is the last place I expected to find what I found inside her pages.

What I found immersive in her writing was being able to be on the inside of these men who work in a field so utterly masculine, and to get a glimpse of their struggle to be more than what they’re taught to perform, and to see them learning how to let go of constricting ideas around masculinity and inherited wounds.

Meanwhile, the women in her stories revealed themselves on the page with their own sovereignty and complexity, not just as the healers to the wounded men. But what touched me deeply was how Karla writes grief.

Grief in her books is rendered with such specific care that I felt I was getting my own therapy session inside the pages of her books. The covers and synopses get you to the door, but the depth and healing, along with some of the best yearning and erotic tension, are revealed in the room behind them.

When I asked Karla what readers tell her, what messages land differently from the others, she said grief and loss. And then, almost in passing, mentioned that before she wrote full-time, she had worked at a hospice, even bringing her certified therapy dog there. She sat with people who knew what was coming, and that piece of her formation helped me understand why her books serve us a five-course meal of not just love and yearning, but the healing power of witnessing grief, and how one can break the chain of inherited wounds.

By now, in all my conversations with romance authors, this is the thing I keep finding, conversation after conversation, book after book: that this genre so often dismissed as escapist is doing some of the most serious work in popular fiction right now.

Romance authors write towards not just transformation, but union, the oft-considered formulaic “happy ending.” But these stories, dressed in sexy clothes and at times luscious covers, beckon readers into experiences that are, at their core, about becoming.

Romantic stories help us rehearse (quietly, collectively, under the cover of the trope) the shape of what we’re trying to grow into.

That’s what Romancing the Threshold is becoming, I feel: a space to listen for the medicine in unexpected places. To pay attention to what stories are doing quietly (under the covers, pun intended!), even when they don’t announce themselves.

It’s about romancing our own becoming by paying attention to what’s already found us.

I hope you’ll enjoy my conversation with Karla. We talked about how characters arrive, what the body of the writer knows that the mind doesn’t, the labor of bringing a story into being, and a few things I didn’t see coming, even a bit about my birth story that surprised her.

It was, by any honest measure, a masterclass.

Guest Bio

Karla Sorensen - Contemporary Romance Author

Karla Sorensen is a #1 Amazon bestselling author who refuses to read or write anything without a happily ever after. When she's not reading or avoiding the laundry, you can find her watching football, watching her kids play sports or binding a book. With a degree in Advertising and Public Relations from Grand Valley State University, she made her living in senior healthcare prior to writing full-time. Karla lives in Michigan with her husband, two boys and a big, shaggy rescue dog named Bear.