At 12:30 a.m. the night before Cathy and I were to board a plane to Kennedy airport and then on to Burlington, Vermont, I happened to check my phone where I learned the flight from Kennedy to Burlington had been cancelled, and, when Cathy called Delta, she learned that there were no other flights the rest of the day. I needed to be in Burlington that evening for the start of the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers Conference where I’ve taught the past fifteen summers. What were we to do? The only thing we could do. Come 6 a.m., we were in the car, Vermont-bound, a twelve-hour road trip ahead of us.

Would you believe we didn’t turn on the radio a single time? When it came to long road trips, this wasn’t our first rodeo. Ten years ago, we made the drive from our native southeastern Illinois to Lubbock, Texas, for the wedding of a former student. We were in Cathy’s Mustang GT that time (she even let me drive!), and again, we never turned on the radio. As we did on our Vermont trip, we talked. We used the pairings of two cities on road signs to create characters, and we told stories about them. The time and the miles passed. We rarely squabbled even on the fourteen-hour return trip thanks to the heavy rains of tropical storm Debby. Cathy and I travel well together, which should never be the case for our characters.

Professor Brooke, in Tobias Wolff’s story, “An Episode in the Life of Professor Brooke,” is looking forward to driving alone to a regional MLA conference. We know from the opening paragraph that he “had no real quarrel with anyone in his department.” He did, however, dislike a Yeats scholar named Riley. The night before Brooke’s drive, he gets a call from Riley, whose car is in the shop, and wouldn’t you know it, he wonders if he could catch a ride to the conference with Brooke. As the story goes on to illustrate, this is a perfect pairing of characters. We get excellent mileage out of such a pairing especially if the characters can’t escape from each other. In this case, Brooke’s car encloses them, and it’s even impossible for them to lose each other at the conference which provides another claustrophobic setting. Tensions simmer until they finally have their release. We put our characters on a collision course that eventually must have its climax.

To put this into practice with a piece of fiction, ask yourself which two characters have tensions between them but due to politeness they keep them submerged. Give them a setting that makes it difficult for them to ignore each other. Daydream a plot that brings them closer and closer to letting those tensions come to light. Find a climactic moment in which each character knows exactly what the other thinks of them. The same prompts apply for a piece of creative nonfiction.

Writers must be matchmakers. The proper match increases the tension and articulates the stakes of the narrative. We can’t always be blessed with the perfect travel partners. If we were, what stories would we tell?