The book started as a category instinct, not a story. Having raised three sons who played and obsessed over sports, Painter described sports fandom as ‘kind of hardwired’ in her, and that wiring was enough to send her toward a hockey setting. What she found there surprised her.

Lynn Painter

Initially, I just wanted to write a hockey book because who doesn’t love a sports romance, right? But when I went up to see my Minnesota cousins and do book research, I fell head-over-heels in love with their town and its hockey community. Suddenly it was just as much about found-family and Minnesota as it was about hot hockey players hockeying around!

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shereads.com, “Lynn Painter Talks About Diving Into the Sports Romance Space”

The shift in the book’s center of gravity happened during those visits, not at the desk. Painter attended practices and games and watched her cousin’s circle function as extended family, a tight community where everybody knew everybody. That observation, more than any plot idea, is what she brought home.

Lynn Painter

I was like, now I want this to be the story. Not just cute hockey player, but like family and the community, and you know, that sort of a thing. [paraphrased from audio]

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Simon Teen, “Lynn Painter’s Journey to BETTER THAN THE MOVIES | Off Book with Simon Teen | Episode 5”

Once the setting was locked, the structure of the central relationship followed from a separate conviction about what makes a romance work. The choice to give Dani and Alec years of shared history before the story opens was not a trope grab but a preference Painter returns to deliberately.

Lynn Painter

I looooove stories where the main characters have history. It’s so fun to allow each of them to slowly reconcile what they thought they knew about the other with the reality of who they’ve actually become.

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shereads.com, “Lynn Painter Talks About Diving Into the Sports Romance Space”

Painter’s research trips gave her the emotional texture of the hockey world, but translating that onto the page required a different kind of work. Knowing the rules of the sport was the easy part; understanding how a player’s mind moves inside a game was the gap she had to close.

Lynn Painter

I had to learn a LOT about hockey, because it’s easy to know the ‘facts’ and ‘rules’ about a sport, but trickier to try and figure out the verbiage and way of thinking an actual player has about the sport.

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thenerddaily.com, “Q&A: Lynn Painter, Author of ‘Fake Skating’”

The book alternates between Dani’s and Alec’s perspectives. Painter settled into dual point of view with ‘Mr. Wrong Number’ and described her reasoning in a Publishers Weekly interview about ‘Nothing Like the Movies’: once inside a second character’s head, the structure became something she could not give up. In ‘Fake Skating’, the logic is the same. Two people who have been misreading each other for years need both angles in play for the tension to hold.

Lynn Painter

I fell in love with being in Wes’s head. I don’t know if I’m ever going to write a book that’s not dual POV now, because I like it so much.

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publishersweekly.com, “Q & A with Lynn Painter”

The fake-dating premise, which sits at the book’s center, is a trope Painter has used before and defends without apology. In a Simon Teen video recorded around the book’s release, she placed it at the top of her tropes ranking and explained why it keeps pulling her back.

Lynn Painter

It doesn’t happen in real life. No one ever fake dates and falls in love, but it’s the greatest thing to play with and I love it so much. [paraphrased from audio]

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Simon Teen, “New York Times Bestselling Author Lynn Painter Ranks Rom-Com Tropes”

That gap between impossibility and wish is precisely what makes the premise work for her: the reader knows the outcome is inevitable, and the pleasure is in watching two people who are supposed to be pretending run out of reasons not to mean it.

Among the book’s supporting cast, one character stood apart for her. When the Nerd Daily asked which character she had most enjoyed writing, she answered without hesitation.

Lynn Painter

Grandpa Mick is my favorite for sure!!!!!

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thenerddaily.com, “Q&A: Lynn Painter, Author of ‘Fake Skating’”

Painter frames ‘Fake Skating’ not as a hockey story that happens to be set in high school, but as something more specific: a found-family story and a childhood-friendship story that use hockey as the container. The distinction matters to her because it explains why the town itself is a character.

Lynn Painter

It’s sports romance, but sandwiched-between childhood-friends-to-not-friends-anymore and a found-family vibe that centers around an entire town (that is obsessed with hockey).

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thenerddaily.com, “Q&A: Lynn Painter, Author of ‘Fake Skating’”

Writing YA is a deliberate commitment for Painter, not a market calculation. She has said it is her favorite form to work in, and she grounds that preference in a specific claim about emotional capacity: teenagers feel at a depth that adult life gradually trains away, and fiction set in that period can recover it.

Lynn Painter

Writing YA is definitely my favorite. I feel like when you’re a teenager, you allow yourself to really sit in your emotions in a way that you never will again. It’s so deep and beautiful, even when it hurts, because you linger instead of turning it off (which is ultimately how we learn to survive heartbreak, right?).

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shereads.com, “Lynn Painter Talks About Diving Into the Sports Romance Space”

That is the invitation ‘Fake Skating’ extends to its reader: not just to watch two people fall in love, but to stay inside the feeling longer than a more efficient story would allow.