Why do love triangles get such a bad rap anyway? 

Because too many love triangles flatten into formulas. One love interest is clearly superior. The other is a cardboard obstacle. The emotional stakes feel forced, and readers resent being dragged through a triangle that feels like a delay tactic instead of a meaningful choice. 

But if you understand why love triangles work—and how to elevate the structure—you can write one that even triangle skeptics will dog-ear, debate, and pine over. 

In my debut YA fantasy, The Art of Exile, I wrote the kind of love triangle that has always been my favorite to read. The kind that leaves readers unsure of who they want the protagonist to end up with, that will lead to factions among fans, that will challenge friendships. And I must have done something right, because I’ve gotten quite a few responses from readers saying things like, “I usually hate love triangles, but this one? This one worked.” 

So what makes a love triangle work? We can answer that by understanding why they keep drawing us in despite their messy reputation. 

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Why We’re Drawn to Love Triangles in the First Place 

The love triangle is, at its core, a fantasy of abundance. Not just of attention or affection, but of possibility. It gives your character—and your reader—permission to explore a forbidden or uncertain part of themselves without committing too soon. It’s desire stretched across a tightrope: the thrill of temptation without immediate payoff, the ache of being seen in two opposite ways. 

There’s something inherently transgressive about love triangles. The character is almost always betraying someone emotionally. There’s a teasing polyamorous undercurrent, even in stories that resolve monogamously. It’s messy, but safely so. For readers, it’s a way to tap into complexity and conflict without real-world consequences. 

The love triangle is more than just a romantic subplot. At its best, it gives your protagonist space to explore longing, morality, and identity, all while keeping tension taut. The second you resolve romantic tension in a story, you have to work ten times harder to sustain momentum. But a well-structured triangle? It builds tension constantly. You can delay the payoff without dragging it out. You can deepen the stakes while keeping things volatile.  

And all that emotional danger? That’s what makes it addictive. 

So how do we do it right? 

The Anatomy of a Great Love Triangle 

1. Both love interests must be viable but not perfect. 

In real life, no one is perfect. A triangle gives your protagonist the illusion of choice, but each option should highlight a different core truth. One might reflect safety and shared values; the other, passion and challenge. The best triangles aren’t about who’s right, they’re about who reveals the most about your main character. 

If one option is clearly the “right” choice, it’s not a triangle, it’s a delay.  

In The Art of Exile, my protagonist is caught between two bad ideas. One is her mentor—older than her, emotionally generous but boundary-impaired, someone who brings out her ideals but maybe not her healthiest instincts. The other is a classmate who starts off as her enemy: arrogant, promiscuous, and cruel—but their magical chemistry and forced proximity start to erode both of their walls, making her question her ideals and examine her instincts. 

Neither is the perfect answer. And that’s the point. Because… 

2. The triangle is about the protagonist, not the prize. 

Don’t write two love interests and ask, “Who will the character choose?” Instead, ask, “Who is the character when they’re with each person?” A great triangle reveals your protagonist’s flaws, fears, and growth. It externalizes their internal conflict. The triangle becomes a metaphor for their emotional crossroads. 

3. Chemistry matters, but conflict matters more. 

A triangle isn’t a true triangle unless each connection offers friction. Your characters need to disagree. To challenge each other’s worldview. To strip away layers.  

Don’t just give them spark. Give them conflict. Let each love interest challenge something core about the protagonist—whether it’s their values, their beliefs, or their sense of self. The triangle should tug them in two directions, each uncomfortable in a different way. 

A well-written triangle builds constant tension. It doesn’t just delay the kiss, it deepens the emotional stakes. A good triangle isn’t a distraction from the plot. It is the plot, refracted through intimacy. 

In my book, the protagonist’s morals are at odds with both of her love interests in completely opposite ways, but that tension is what forces them all to change. A good triangle doesn’t just tease romance; it accelerates transformation. 

4. The love interests should be foils of each other. 

If one is charming, make the other cutting. If one is emotionally available, make the other mysterious. Let each option offer a different kind of vulnerability, and let your protagonist discover who they are in each dynamic. 

From Jane Eyre choosing between Rochester and St. John, to Katniss Everdeen juggling Gale and Peeta, to Elena Gilbert’s struggle between the Salvatore brothers—the classics have become the classics by making the triangle about more than romance. It’s about identity. It’s about the internal tug-of-war that plays out through the character’s interactions with two completely opposite characters. 

In The Art of Exile, my protagonist’s love interests aren’t just opposites, they reflect the split in her own identity. One offers connection through shared ideals; the other, through raw, challenging intensity. Neither is more right than the other, but their contrasts help her recognize what kind of decisions she’s finally ready to make outside of her romantic relationships. 

5. Let the reader flip-flop. 

The most satisfying triangles are the ones that split your audience down the middle. Every time one love interest wins your reader over, make the other do something irresistible. Or awful. Or unexpectedly kind. This is what makes a triangle unforgettable. One chapter, they’re Team A. The next, they’re screaming for Team B. They should feel conflicted. Make the reader agonize. That’s what keeps them reading. They should see the flaws and the beauty in both. The emotional whiplash is the point. 

When It’s Done Right 

Even if you’re writing for readers who roll their eyes at love triangles, you can win them over if you avoid the obvious choice, ground the triangle in genuine emotional stakes, and let it be messy. Let it feel real. 

The goal isn’t to write a fairytale. It’s to capture the chaos of longing, of feeling two different versions of yourself being pulled in opposite directions. 

Love triangles work because they reflect a universal truth: in life, we’re often torn between the familiar and the risky. The safe path and the thrilling one. The person who makes us feel seen, and the one who makes us feel changed. 

Writing a love triangle that honors that complexity—where the question isn’t “Who will they choose?” but “What will this choice reveal about them?”—can turn even the most ardent triangle-haters into fully invested stay-up-for-just-one-more-chapter readers. 

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(Secrets We Keep From Each Other.)

Distinct from moral control, one of the most beautiful aspects of books is their ability to achieve a kind of mind-control by transcending the boundaries of consciousness, by taking over through subsumption. A book can only achieve this if the writer has written with complete and unconscious faith in the reality of his characters: Only then can a character stand for himself, only then can he stay vivid and strong (even if the character himself is weak-hearted and spineless) as readers address him with their queries, or project onto him their visions and theories. 

When writing fiction, the desire to too directly guide a reader has never occurred to me. Ava, the narrator of my debut novel What You Make of Me, invites projection; she invites a bit of theorizing, despite her defiance and desire for control. A reader might wonder at her aims, at her self-awareness, at the things she says and her reasons for saying them, at her art (she is a painter). But while writing, I felt I knew Ava and understood her. She was multidimensional to me. My goal (‘goal’ is not quite the right word… but my ‘charge’ sounds absurd) was to create a character who is equal parts definitive, present, evasive, inward, self-contradictory. 

Confronting this challenge became my favorite part of writing the novel. I was constantly aware of Ava’s shifting levels of self-awareness. I wanted a few aspects of her psyche to bubble up, cross the threshold of consciousness, and make their way into clear, explicit writing. I needed other aspects of her psyche to hover just below that threshold of consciousness, to be underthoughts that haunt but do not penetrate the narrative.

At times Ava has an idea of what is hovering just below. At times she does not. Then—when she thinks she does know—at times she is right, at times she is mistaken; further, at times she knows she is mistaken about herself, and at times she does not know she is mistaken (but the reader, perhaps, knows she is mistaken). This is all to say: Ava is a human being, with oblique paths of access into herself, some more right and revelatory than others, some errant (but still, somehow, psychologically productive). 

AND WHY SHOULDN’T THAT BE TRUE?? AFTER ALL…in a novel, it is a characters’ ultimate unknowability—their ability to evade our capture—that endows them with real human spirit, for the simple reason that in the real world, real human beings possess an inwardness that is and should be inaccessible to us. We don’t know if Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is frigid and remote despite or because of her romanticism (or neither). In Lolita we can’t quite gauge Humbert Humbert’s interpretation of his primordial wound (that first love), or its impact on his psyche. We don’t know for sure if Dostoyevsky’s monkish Alyosha is noble and circumspect, or if he is rather weak, naive—or if he is each of these things (he is!). 

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As Zadie smith writes in “Fascinated to presume: In Defense of Fiction”: “Fiction suspects that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest … Fiction is suspicious of any theory of the self that appears to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye (…) Fiction—at least the kind that is any good—is full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It has grave doubts about the nature of the self.” 

It is this doubt—the doubt we feel even when looking into the eyes of a loved one and feeling not just closeness but in fact, and paradoxically, an insuperable distance—that feels most human, that drives and feeds our will to know and understand. In novels, we might come to love characters or despise them; we might argue in defense of them, or protest their actions; we might put our book down and feel a narrator’s presence as a shadow self throughout the day, or we might put a book down as if it is the blade that will slice through us next we return. 

A text, I believe, is at its deepest when the reader does about as much ushering in of her own as possible. It’s not that writers trust their readers to do this (or trust their readers to hold the ‘right’ impression of their characters), it’s that readers always and must do this—they must use their minds to co-engineer a character. It is an ineluctable part of the reading process (see Barthes, etc). The most a writer can (must) do is put human spirit onto the page in all its lucidity and difficulty. Thus my decision not to ‘explain’ on Ava’s behalf is not an intentional act of evasion, it’s an unconscious process of trying to generate reality. 

Of course, because I respect her life and humor, and because I have faith in Ava, it would make me itch to see readers come to her with what I take to be misunderstanding. But that’s the way it goes. There’s nothing she or I can do. The reader must take over, accrue his own impressions of Ava, and project his own reasons, and supply his own logic. 

This fact, I believe, wouldn’t bother her. I hope readers will see her as the kind of person who is both radically open—she would change her clothes with the door open in a dressing room or easily talk constipation—while at the same time rigorous in protecting a deeper privacy, a more profound and complete solitude, her inwardness, which no misunderstanding could touch.

Check out Sophie Madeline Dess’ What You Make of Me here:

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(25 Plot Twist Ideas and Prompts for Writers.)

This is something I tried to do in my debut novel, An Ethical Guide to Murder, where a failed lawyer, Thea, discovers she has power over life and death. She can tell exactly how long someone has to live and transfer that life from one person to another—killing the first person in the process. She wants to do the right thing and creates an “Ethical Guide to Murder” to punish the wrongdoers and give the deserving more time. But of course, deciding who gets to live and die is tricky, to say the least, and she quickly finds herself in an ethical minefield.

When I describe it, people get excited about Thea’s power and instantly start asking questions I explore in the novel. So, without any further waffle, here are my tips for giving your character powers that people care about.

Find your why

Superpowers tend to be more interesting when there’s a point to them. For example, telepathy is endlessly fascinating because we’d all love to know what people really think. Getting clear on what you care about will help you define your world, the story, and the power itself.

I was interested in the concept of fairness. Specifically, how is it fair that some good people die young while some bad people live long healthy lives? So, I gave Thea the power to change this.

So, what do you care about? I recommend doing some rambling free-writing to figure this out because you probably care about more than one thing. Continually ask yourself “and why do I care about this?” until you zero in on what feels like the most important reason—use this as the anchor for your story.

Connect character with powers

Your character and their power are intertwined. You’ve probably heard of concepts like “fatal flaws” and “defining misbeliefs”—powers are a great way to amplify these and see what they are really made of.

In Ethical Guide, Thea starts with a very black-and-white view of morality. Suddenly gaining power over life and death upends this worldview, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what “the right thing to do” really is. This gave me much more scope for character development than say, giving the power to an evil serial killer. No ethical dilemmas there, just murder.

She’s also a hot mess who struggles to be responsible for her own laundry—not someone you would trust with such power. Sometimes, giving powers to a surprising or unusual character and seeing what they do with it is more interesting than the power itself. It’s definitely more fun to write.

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More power more problems

Powers will help your character solve problems, but they should create just as many. Some of these will be external problems. Is there a cost to using the power? What happens if your character’s power is discovered? How will they learn to control it? Do other people have powers too?

But my favorite problems are the internal ones. A character with trust issues might struggle to find mentors. One with anger issues might use their power rashly and get caught.

The more powerful your character is, the bigger the problems you need to give them. This stops them simply solving the conflict of your novel too easily. In Ethical Guide, Thea is extremely powerful, but she’s also facing the impossible problem of deciding how to “ethically” murder people (alongside others, many of her own making).

Create a fresh spin

It’s hard to create a truly unique power. You also don’t have to. I hadn’t seen Thea’s exact power before, but I’ve read about characters with the power to kill by touch and ones who could tell how long someone had to live. Sometimes you might combine existing ideas to create something new, or slightly change how a power works.

Your fresh spin could even be the situation or the setting. In Naomi Alderman’s The Power, the most unique aspect is not the power itself, but the fact that young women everywhere develop it overnight. In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lauren has hyperempathy. But what’s so unusual is that she has this power in a dystopian world full of pain and suffering. It can physically incapacitate her at times, making it an extremely dangerous ability to have.

Remember that it’s your character and ideas that make your story unique. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel unless you want to.

Let the reader discover the power

My final tip is a quick one. It’s tempting to over-explain how a power works, especially if you’ve put a lot of thought into it. Don’t! Give us enough to understand what’s going on, and then leave little seeds to intrigue us. Coming up with theories about how a power works is fun, especially if we’re proven right later on. Or, even more fun, when there’s a clever twist we didn’t see coming.

Check out Jenny Morris’ An Ethical Guide to Murder here:

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Go dark and stay dark

Today’s best crime fiction leads with a crime, a criminal, and a victim. Resist the urge for backstory, meet cute, a day in the life of your detective, or any clever opening you’ve seen done once by a mega bestselling author who has earned the right to delay fulfilling reader desires. Horrific crime + villain + victim who deserves justice is the impetus of every crime fiction novel. Start dark and stay dark, with violence, murder, theft, betrayal, kidnapping, and the like. For a series, weave this crime into an underlying crime narrative and/or villain who can extend across books and have readers leaning in from one to the next.

Torture your lead

Readers today embrace suffering, and it starts with your lead. Give her a tortured past that results in Grand Canyon-sized flaws in her character and haunts her to the present, influencing her choices and behaviors and shaping her motivations. Something about the combination of the crime plus your lead must result in her drive toward justice, which makes her willing to take chances with her wellbeing… and that of others. Then, plant people and things in her life that are important to her so you can torture her by putting them at risk or taking them away. Beware the desire to solve her problems. She must continue suffering for reader enjoyment.

Crave sympathy

Every crime begs a criminal. Crime fiction especially begs one with a capacity for evil, but a healthy dose of self-justification and motive that must make sense even as we law abiding denizens of good cannot accept it. Your criminal will be driven by the mirror image of that which is driving your lead to pursue justice. He will be creepy but not one-dimensional with a unique signature to the crimes. How creepy? That depends on the comfort level of your readers for darkness. And your own…

Breaking legs

It’s not only the crime narrative and your lead’s dark past that help you create a series. It’s also the supporting cast of realistic if imperfect characters with their conflicting motives and desires. Every one of them should have a backstory (at least known to you), even if only one sentence, that makes them memorable and launchable into roles in future books. Your lead cannot carry the burden of sustaining reader interest alone. Beware killing off one of them on a whim when they are necessary for the legs of the series, but do not shy away if it’s their time to go.

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Introduce the fear factor

Let your readers feel fear through the five senses of the crime victims, characters they care about because of their authenticity. Build up the tension and amplify the terror in the cutaway shot, where your readers use their imaginations to paint a scene far worse than you’ll ever describe for them. Stephen King’s It comes to mind.

House of horrors

A cabin in the woods, a deserted warehouse, a posh apartment overlooking Central Park. Wherever your crime is set, give it the depth and authenticity of a character. The sounds, the smells, the textures, the emotions it evokes. The weather, the terrain, the culture, the traffic, the community, the food. Once you figure out the capacity to create havoc and terror in your setting, you will more clearly see what kinds of characters live within it and what they will be up to. This may impact your crime, criminal, and victim, in the best of all writing worlds.

Electric shock

Another reasonable expectation of your reader is that you will deliver unto them a dizzying series of electric shocks in the form of chapter ending cliffhangers, timely and well-extended red herrings, and jaw-dropping plot twists at crucial beats within the story. Peruse the reviews of successful contemporary crime fiction and you will see the theme of twists, surprises, and shocks repeated across them. It may be tempting to end a few chapters or acts on notes of success or peace but see above Torture the lead and resist, resist, resist.

Detail kills

In the world of crime fiction, assume every reader is an armchair expert (sometimes, they truly are). Consult or research to ensure your details are correct and use them to build a plausible story that is on the bounds of possibility and credulity. But omit most of what you learned. Use just enough, not too much. Write it authentic but lean. Why? Detail kills. Not only is this where you will inevitably make a poor judgment call or an outright error, but excessive detail kills pace. And the death of excitement, tension, and forward propulsion in your book may be the death of your series.

Just desserts

Depending on your sub-genre, you’ll end your story with a solve or not, justice or not, retribution or not. Beware failing to know which your readers need to continue with the world you’ve built. You’ll have taken them on a journey of suspense, repugnance, and excitement. Might they be craving some modicum of relief?  They’ll skewer you publicly over any clues and loose ends you fail to wrap up, at the least. A comment on society cleverly woven into the fabric of your book and subtly punctuated in the final pages can help further delicious closure for many readers.

Mastering these elements may make you the hero who saves your own story from a gruesome death.

Check out Pamela Fagan Hutchins’ Her Burning Lies here:

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(Building and Maintaining Tension in a Thriller Novel.)

I don’t have many hard rules for writing fiction, but I’ve often observed that the missing element of reader engagement is a lack of conflict. Here are five thoughts to masticate on, in a purely literary sense.

1. Establish a conflict right away

In my new novel, The Monosexual, we meet Vincent Cappalini in a hospital bed, unable to recall how he got there. He doesn’t even know how serious his condition is. He can see and hear. The IV bottle drip and rhythm reminds him of a Sinatra song. Some memories begin to return. And then he takes inventory. He starts with with his fingers and limbs. Soon he’s wondering if his genitals are intact. This scenario sets up one big conflict; i.e., what happened to Vincent? 

And the story is bolstered by a series of sub-conflicts—does he have the use of his fingers, legs, genitals? And so on. And why should we care? With the return of memory, new conflicts come up—missing his girlfriend. She took a flight to California and left him, but why? Conflicts accrue as the novel moves forward and they escalate in intensity. 

The reader needs to keep reading and keep turning the pages to find out how this will be resolved. And that’s our job as writers, isn’t it, to keep readers turning the pages? Or maybe it’s something else?

2. Wow, I just transitioned to a new point

See what I did there, and not so subtly? At the end of that first point, I raised another question. It was a facetious and mostly rhetorical question, no doubt, but maybe it prompted you to see what No. 2 was about in this article. 

That’s what you should be doing—in a much more artful manner—at the end of all your chapters. Guiding and propelling your readers to a new scene and chapter. Don’t ever let readers feel they are at an end point. If the reader feels your story is resolved, you’re giving the reader a reason to stop reading. Compel your reader to read on by leaving the future uncertain at the end of your chapters. The exception may be the last section or chapter, of course, although it’s okay to resolve some things and leave others open-ended. 

By the end of The Monosexual and in my first published novel The Sweep of the Second Hand, conflicts and uncertainties about the future of the protagonist still loom large at the end of the book, but in a more hopeful light, perhaps. I guess you’d need to read it to decide that for yourself. Just sayin’. The point is, a chapter that ends with an emerging, unresolved conflict will keep people reading.

Check out Dean Monti’s The Monosexual here:

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3. Conflict can be big or small

In The Monosexual, I started with a major conflict (man in hospital with temporary amnesia), but a smaller conflict can be just as effective, and it’s usually two conflicts or concepts juxtaposed. In my novel The Sweep of the Second Hand, I started with a man losing a minute of sleep each night and fretting about the consequences (the most dire of which might be pulling off his own nose in the night). The protagonist also had yellow jackets living in his wall—another conflict that exacerbated his sleep and mental health. 

But conflict can begin as simply as “I have a Zoom meeting in five minutes and my camera is not working.” Or “I have a Zoom meeting in five minutes and my camera is working, but I gained five pounds since the last call.” Conflict is a flat tire, a head cold, a broken pencil, a snapped shoelace, a stopped watch, a mysteriously missing favorite blue shirt. It’s a cobra in your clothes hamper. Okay, that last one is probably a bigger conflict. But conflict is anything that causes anxiety. Like writing this essay. Which leads me to:

4. Conflict is everywhere and it’s relatable

I can get anxious and some of my best friends are anxious people. Some of them struggle with the same problems I do, and some have different worries. But worry and anxiety are experienced universally. And people who worry usually care, deeply, about things. Use our collective anxiety to your benefit. 

All readers can relate to feeling anxious, and they also care about people who care about things, so it can often develop empathy for your protagonist. Always keep what the protagonist(s) wants and needs just out of reach. If you do your job well, readers will root for your characters to get what they want and need, but particularly after you put them through hell to get it.

5. This just got awkward

Consciously or otherwise—I tend to put my characters in awkward situations, and then raise that to the level of absurdity while still grounding it in reality. 

In The Monosexual, the protagonist Vincent arrives at a hotel he’s never been to before, hoping for a nice room—something we might all agree is a universal situation we’ve all experienced. It’s a themed hotel (these are becoming increasingly popular) and he is at first elated to learn from the front desk clerk that his room will be on the Presidential Floor. Excellent. Unfortunately, Vincent has been booked into the James Madison room, and James Madison was the smallest American president (an unimposing 5’ 4” to be exact, if you like trivia), so Vincent ends up in a ridiculously tiny hotel room because James Madison was a small president. Play with disparate elements such as these. 

Mix up things awkwardly, including situations and emotions, and particularly in dialogue. Create misunderstandings. As Gordon Gekko said in Wall Street, “Awkward is good.” No, he didn’t say that, but I’m choosing to end this awkwardly. 

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Trust me: The more we dig, the more sense it’s going to make.

Whether you’re watching The Sound of Music or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: a group of people come together, and as they interact, their emotions grow—until they boil over.

At which point, there is singing or there is fighting.

That emotional peak is like the crest of a wave.

Your pulse rises. Your senses are engaged.

Like all waves, it must recede, and the story dips down into the trough. That cooling off period is like a pressure release valve. The characters need it, but so do you.

Because there’s another wave coming.

That’s what waves do—they rise and fall, much like a story should. And in a really good story, those crests and troughs are going to get bigger as you go along, building to a climax: a soul-stirring song or a fight to determine someone’s fate.

Good fights and good songs are cool, sure, but they’re not there because they’re cool. They advance the story. They make you a promise. Most of all, they make the characters more accessible and draw you closer to them. On a technical level, these genres are great for establishing their authority. But on an emotional level, putting characters in a place of emotional or physical vulnerability makes it easier to identify with them—and to root for them.

It’s in recognizing these things that you can become a better storyteller.

World-Building

In the 1999 film The Matrix, humans have been enslaved by machines and stuck into a virtual reality designed to keep them docile. A group of rebels led by Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) recruit Neo (Keanu Reeves), who they believe is the chosen one meant to free them.

Neo’s training begins, via virtual downloads, because the war will be fought on a digital landscape; in the realm of the mind rather than the physical body. After 10 hours of this training, Neo proclaims, “I know kung fu.”

Morpheus responds: “Show me.”

And they’re whisked into a virtual program, which Morpheus explains was designed to teach the rebel fighters that they’re only limited by their minds—some rules of physics can be bent, while others can be broken.

Then they fight!

Neo is bursting with excitement at his newfound prowess. Morpheus defends himself in a confident, almost detached manner. Neo grows frustrated, unable to land a single punch.

Morpheus chides him. “You’re faster than this. Don’t think you are. Know you are.”

Neo takes a breath. He drops into a place of stillness. They engage again. This time, Neo is faster, more focused, and the fight ends as he nearly strikes Morpheus, his fist hovering a fraction of an inch from his mentor’s face.

What did we learn here?

The whole sequence lasts a little under five minutes, but we got some great world-building on the rules of the virtual world—dictated and simultaneously expressed through combat. We got a sense of both characters. We watched them emotionally develop, as Neo comes into his confidence, and Morpheus recognizes Neo’s aptitude. We got to cheer for Neo as he took another step toward the ultimate goal of saving humanity (something we all have a vested interest in, even in a fictional setting).

It’s the zenith of that old writing adage: “Show, don’t tell.” Neo telling Morpheus he knows kung fu is meaningless. He had to show him—and us.

Plus, we got a really cool sequence designed by the legendary fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, because what’s the point if we’re not having fun?

After that, we take a breath. More world-building. More character stuff.

Until the next action sequence comes, which is slightly bigger, each acting as a plateau that drives the narrative to the next foundational level.

Character

West Side Story. A spin on Romeo & Juliet, set in the 1950s and featuring two rival New York City gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, both grappling for turf on the Upper West Side. For the sake of this exercise, we’ll refer to Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film version (there are clips of this song and the aforementioned fight scene on YouTube, if you want to follow along).

Ansel Elgort plays Tony, a Jet on parole, trying to live a more virtuous life. He meets and falls in love with María (Rachel Zegler), who is engaged to a Shark.

Things are not destined to end well.

Pretty early into the story we get “Jet Song,” which introduces us to, you guessed it, the Jets. The number starts with the gang discussing Tony: members are worried that Tony is out, but their leader Riff (Mike Faist) insists Tony is still one of them—through the power of song.

Riff learns about the Jets: their culture, their values, their hierarchy. It’s clear they consider themselves a family, and Tony leaving is a threat to their strength and identity. When we see the familial bond these characters have, we can better understand why they fight so hard for each other. We can all identify with the power of family—whether it’s the kind we’re born with, or in this case, the chosen kind.

And they don’t just tell us they’re a powerful unit by means of the lyrics—they show us through choreographed action. The gang dances in tandem through the streets, wandering into traffic as cars screech to a halt. People see them and recoil or run in fear.

The entire performance lasts less than three minutes, but in that brief time we got world-building, a musical dissertation on the stakes, and an introduction to one of the movie’s major factions. It established the gang’s bond, their tough-guy bona fides (as tough as a group of theater kids can be), and their technical proficiency as singers.

Structure

These are great scenes, but I doubt anyone would rank them as the best in their respective films. A good storytelling wave isn’t a horizontal line. It climbs, reaching its height at the climax.

Do you put the biggest and the best fight at the beginning of The Matrix? Nope! It comes at the end. Neo versus nigh-invincible computer programs in the form of black-suited agents.

“Jet Song” is a fine piece of singing, but it doesn’t carry the emotional weight of María singing over Tony’s dead body (that’s not a spoiler, the first production was in 1957, and anyway, I already said the story was a spin on Romeo & Juliet).

It’s important to think about this prioritization of impact when structuring your own narratives.

If you break it down, Spielberg’s West Side Story has 22 numbers, each one offering a crest, with a trough of character development and scene-setting and breath-catching in between. The Matrix has approximately seven major action set pieces (that’s if you consider set pieces within the last act as separate [the helicopter rescue, the subway fight], which, I do).

More than that, every song and every action sequence has to be relevant and transformational to the story.

Cool, but functional.

Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, said that anyone can write a “bad song,” but even worse is writing a “wrong song,” one that doesn’t have any purpose or meaning.

And dancing is a little like fighting, right? Moulin Rouge! The Musical choreographer Sonya Tayeh said she watches shows “without music and [edits] accordingly, making sure every breath, every inch of movement is driving the story.”

You ever see a plot diagram? You can find one pretty easily online. It looks like a mountain, with the beginning, then a straight slope up, consisting of rising action, until you get to the peak—the climax. The slope down is the falling action, until you get to the end.

To my mind, the lines in the classic plot diagram are far too straight.

I believe a good storytelling line has little crests and troughs in them throughout—which tend to be much more apparent in genre stories, because of the expectations they set through the promises they make to the viewer: that some form of peril is imminent.

Pacing

Pacing is so important, and it’s everywhere. If you take a quick turn to Broadway, you realize how technical the format is. The ebb and flow of action and information is built into the foundational structure of many shows, so much so there are terms for them.

Most musicals have a big Opening Number, clearly establishing the world, the characters, and the show you’re about to see. In “Alexander Hamilton,” the first track in Hamilton, the whole cast comes out to tell you about the life of the play’s subject, and Aaron Burr literally tells you he’s going to shoot the guy (again, not a spoiler, because, history).

There’s the I Want song, where the protagonist literally tells us … what they want. In “The Wizard and I,” which Elphaba belts early in Wicked, she dreams about meeting the Wizard (of Oz) so she can find the love and acceptance and beauty she’s always craved.

And then there’s the 11 O’Clock Number, which comes toward the end of the show, and is meant to be a showstopper—a reward for an audience that stayed up late, but also, the culmination of the emotional journey. See: “Memory,” from Cats. I’m not entirely sure what the show is about, but it’s a really dope song.

I’m not saying all stories need to sound the same or follow the exact same format.

But I am saying that some things work because they work.

Head and Heart

We covered world-building, character, and structure. Just as important is the way these stories make a promise by creating a heightened sense of reality, and through this, establishing authority.

This is something Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk talks about. That once you establish authority, “the reader will trust you, believe you, and you can do anything with the plot.”

There are two ways to do this, he says. The “heart” method, through honesty and frankness, and the “head” method, by demonstrating knowledge or proficiency.

Both kung fu movies and musicals are excellent for establishing a high level of technical prowess. It’s easy for us to trust people who are good at things and then to accept the reality their skill sets create, where everyone is a martial arts master or a Broadway-caliber singer.

And there’s an amplified emotional intensity in both of these genres that is captivating and undeniable. The characters are drawn closer—into hitting or kissing range—and we learn more about their true selves in these high-stakes scenarios.

What they want, who they love, what they’ll fight for, and who they’ll die for.

It’s this emotional or physical peril that gives us the opportunity to cheer for them.

Whether it’s Elphaba’s singing “The Wizard and I” or Neo battling for the fate of humanity, these are the moments that truly highlight the stakes, when our allegiance to these characters becomes strongest.

The Bigger Picture

We don’t need to explicitly focus on kung fu movies or musicals to understand the point here.

In fact, I don’t want you to.

I start with those because it’s a little bit funny and will get you to pay attention, but it underscores something really important: You should be reading and watching stories outside your chosen format so you can better see the invisible strands of storytelling common across all genres.

Pull the camera back a little and instead of kung fu, just think about action movies in general. Look at Mad Max: Fury Road. For as propulsive as it is, there is a sense of rising and falling action that gives the juggernaut a heartbeat. There are still moments in which director George Miller allows the audience to catch their breath, but only for a moment—and even that intentionally shortened space amplifies the feeling of perpetual motion.

Crests and troughs. They’re everywhere.

You’ve got dancing in Saturday Night Fever.

You’ve got gunfights in John Wick.

You’ve got boxing in Rocky and football in Friday Night Lights.

I could go on. But I don’t think I need to. Because at this point, I bet you can see it.

Moving forward, those crests and troughs—what they accomplish, what they offer you as a creator—ought to stand out just a little bit more, and you should be better equipped to utilize them in your own stories.

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Order Kelly Loy Gilbert’s Everyone Wants to Know today. 

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It’s an age-old conflict in fiction: that between loyalty and self-interest. Do the characters continue to do what’s expected and demanded of them, or do they go on a kind of hero’s journey to self-realization and do what they believe is right? Here are four rules for writing the conflict in a compelling way.

The characters must be fully realized

If a reader has no investment in the characters, it’s hard to care about whatever conflicts they may face. Establish early on: What is your character’s core desire in life? What is that need in their heart, the thing they long for, that’s remained unfulfilled? What are their foibles, their quirks, their hidden vulnerabilities, their flaws, those tiny acts of everyday heroism? What are the things they’re afraid to face in themselves?

The conflict must be complex

It would be easy to portray Honor’s image-obsessed family as greedy and self-interested people Honor should certainly cut ties with or at least work harder to preserve her own interests against, but life is rarely so cut and dry. Tease out your conflict: What’s the history of it? How has it been a part of your characters’ whole life? How has it shaped them? What are the things it’s given them; how has it been sustaining even as it was harmful? For Honor, her family has been the only constant in her life, the only people who truly know her and accept her as she is.

The stakes must be real

The stakes need to be clear–what else will your characters lose and gain? What is something your character values deeply that they stand to lose? In Honor’s case, some of her most cherished relationships are threatened in a very real way when she starts to try to follow what she wants in life, and soon it becomes clear that she’s going to have to sacrifice either what she wants, or the people she wants in her life.

The story must be surprising

There’s no heat in a story that follows predictable tropes all the way to a predictable end. I won’t give away spoilers, but in Everyone Wants to Know there are several total gut-punching twists; just when Honor thinks she has a handle on things, everything is completely upended.

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My debut novel, Provenance, begins just after a major turning point that’s quickly summed up in the first few pages. DJ, a still-grieving widower, is at an all-time low. Having lost the Brooklyn apartment he’d shared with his wife for 26 years—and run through all the money from her insurance policy—he’s taken refuge in his sister’s half-finished basement, in the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up.

As if that weren’t enough to keep him from wanting to get out of bed, his life is also freighted with over a dozen guitars, plus the thousands of vinyl records—and every other scrap of his Brooklyn life—that fill a nearby storage unit he can’t afford. Now what? is the question I was interested in.

I knew that in the scheme of things—and considering the man he was—he was likely to avoid making any changes at all. So, what could I do, what kind of drama—and turning points—could I create that would help the reader not only care about what happens to him, but also keep them turning the page?

(How I Made My Main Characters Grow in My Novel Series)

1. In Harm’s Way

The world we live in is a treacherous place. Think of the opening sequence of the TV series Six Feet Under, and all the freaky ways you never imagined it was possible to die.

Whether it’s a family member or romantic partner, a friend or someone you barely knew, death draws a definitive line of before and after. It’s an effective—and can be a dramatic—choice for a turning point, and someone’s recent or pending death often serves as a short story or a novel’s premise.

But what lesser physical harm can you trouble your characters with—especially those your protagonist loves or was counting on—that might force them to rise to the occasion or even give up habitual behavior?

Let’s say you’ve got a recalcitrant character who’s resistant to change. A broken arm might result only in their digging their heels into an already passive stance. But if someone they love gets hurt—and it’s in any small way their fault—it’s likely to cause a whole array of possible reactions, and potentially spur them on to significant change.

2. Pile Ups

It’s rarely just one thing that causes us to make a major change in our life’s direction. In Marilynne Robinson’s stunning novel Housekeeping, Ruth and her younger sister Lucille grow up in circumstances of increasing hardship and isolation. First their mother kills herself, then the grandmother who’s been caring for them dies, and then, after the pair of spinster great-aunts next charged with their care have fled, they’re left to carry on in the same water-logged house, under the auspices of their eccentric aunt Sylvie, who’s been living as a drifter. Any one of these scenarios would be enough to trouble a young person’s life, and at first the girls fear being abandoned by Sylvie, too.

I’m over-simplifying the story, but Sylvie’s dreamy impracticality, her odd dress, and embarrassing habits, such as napping on public park benches—all the things that mark her as a drifter—ultimately alienate Lucille, who longs for the normalcy of her school friends’ home lives. Rejecting Sylvie, as well as Ruth, who still aligns with her, Lucille moves into the home of her home economics teacher, and Ruth eventually joins Sylvie in a fully transient lifestyle. It’s for her own survival, of course, but let me underscore that, after living so long with a fear of being left, Lucille ends up abandoning her sister.

The circumstances in Housekeeping tend (wonderfully) toward the extreme. But given the nature of your character’s situation, consider what unexpected losses or responsibilities, what financial or emotional stressors, you can send their way.

3. The Forest and the Trees

While external events trigger a turning point, a character’s response—or lack thereof—is a part of their broader emotional landscape, and scene by scene, as we write a novel, that expanse can become hard to see. Across a character’s life, their triumphs and failures, their moments of joy and grief, may be assigned to the fictive present, backstory, or a flash of memory, but the question is always how to order those experiences in such a way as to have the most meaningful effect on the reader.

Let’s take an affair as a turning point. Do we learn that the protagonist’s first boyfriend cheated on her before we learn of her unfaithfulness to her husband, or after? Is her affair a conscious if misplaced revenge or does she only make that connection after the fact? Would backstory about her parents’ marriage contribute a useful resonance?

In completing a full draft, you’ve had to make any number of choices as to what stays and goes, as well as where it fits in. But is there a way to examine your novel as a whole and see how well those choices are or aren’t serving your story? Creating a reverse outline, a technique I learned from Susan Scarf Merrell, author of Shirley: A Novel, is an illuminating tool to do just that.

Broken down into vertical columns by chapter—or whatever section-by-section dividers make sense—a reverse outline is a wall-length spreadsheet of everything that happens in your novel, in the order that it occurs, with the information written in Sharpie on architectural tracing paper. In other words, it’s a way to see everything at once—the true topography of your manuscript, if you will. A map that’s likely to reveal surprising things about character arc, how events are juxtaposed, and how they might be more effectively arranged—especially in regard to turning points.

Find out more about reverse outlines here.

4. Second to None

In the example of Housekeeping, I noted how, over time, the sisters are repeatedly challenged by narrowed options and punishing circumstances that wear them down. Both girls end up running away—Lucille escaping to her teacher’s home, and Ruth taking up Sylvie’s transient lifestyle. But what happens if instead of, or along with, being bombarded by loss, your protagonist is repeatedly offered a chance to step up to the plate?

One way to develop an effective turning point—in either direction—is to take advantage of secondary characters whose expectations, encouragement, or belief in your protagonist might lead to a shift in allegiance. Love, pride, approval, inclusion, acceptance—what’s the emotional reward that ultimately makes it worth overcoming even the strongest resistance to action or change?

In terms of structure, “repeatedly” is the operative word. Maybe at first, a secondary character merely leads by example, or by displaying opposing personality traits. (Aesop’s ants vs the grasshopper—so to speak.) But then a situation arises in which your protagonist, possibly surprising themselves, gets a taste of that emotional reward.

Then, they disappoint by falling back on their old ways, but your secondary character remains undeterred, and offers yet another opportunity for your protagonist to keep their word or respond in some other notable way. This time, they do—or promise to—step up a little more, but then fail again, etc., etc. Without false starts and backslides, a turning point is hardly credible or satisfying. (And a reverse outline can help determine where best to seed them.)

On the flip side of positive reinforcement, and coming back to the notion of harm’s way, a secondary character’s failure or downward spiral might serve as a “there but for the grace” awakening for your protagonist.

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5. Nobody’s Perfect

If making a substantial change in our behavior—or how we view the world—were easy, there’d be no such thing as therapy. And crafting a character’s motivations—or a novel, really—is like deliberately making a puzzle that’s got missing pieces, while still including just enough of them for the picture to come clear. A cloud here, a bit of fencing there: emerging facts and scraps of memory providing revelation for character and reader alike.

There’s always backstory, of course, for detailing the formative events in a character’s life. But what are the resulting flaws of their history that allow for growth—to whatever degree—within the constraints of their current circumstance? And how can you leverage those flaws for dramatic effect?

Let’s take perfectionism as a flaw. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but let’s say a once wild teen grows up to be social worker with a perfectionistic drive that’s constantly thwarted due to the nature of her job. What happens when her own daughter heads down a dangerous road? Or if her daughter is so over-protected, she’s ill-prepared for leaving home? What if a determination to fix other people’s situations keeps her blind to the issues in her own? Was it damage done to her or damage she perpetrated that pushes her so strongly toward repair? What’s so threatening about a loss of control? And what price did she pay for past imperfection?

Any one of those questions could inspire material that would lead to a turning point, steering your character’s trajectory toward emotional growth, with a flaw that initially seemed minor having a major effect. What’s the flaw that propels both you and your character forward on the page?

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(3 Things to Learn About Writing From Reading The Comfort of Strangers)

My novel, Copper Divide, is set during a massive and violent copper miners’ strike that split the once peaceful community surrounding Calumet, Michigan, in 1913. Thousands were protesting and rioting in the streets. The National Guard was sent in and stayed for months. This story required characters that reflect the conflict of the society they inhabit.

There are many choices and archetypes to choose from for characters that need to inhabit a societal conflict. Should the conflict merely define a time and place, such as in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See? Or should it be integral to the character’s personal struggles?

A society’s troubles could be illuminated with a singular, adaptable archetype, whose journey provides ample opportunity to display a troubled society, as in Adam Johnson’s dark comedic novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, set in North Korea. Magical realism could be employed to provide a fresh, provocative look at today’s issues, such as conflict in the middle east and immigration, as was used in Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West. Creating an alternative history, such as in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, is another method to take readers on a fresh perspective on a subject.

If society’s conflict is integral to the character’s conflict, as it is with my novel, it’s important to create a complex character who is not merely a foil to discuss the problems within society. This is a novel, not an essay, though it can still serve to explore the larger issues. Fiction set during a larger societal conflict allows readers to empathize with the characters and learn more about their world implicitly. Richard Camus called fiction “the lie through which we tell the truth.”

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Copper Divide uses three different protagonists to employ three different points of view during the copper strike. The Jewish shop-keeper’s daughter, Hannah, provides a view from someone who is not directly involved in the strike, but as the strike persists for months, she finds that there is more at stake in her life then she knew at the beginning.

Her friend, Nelma, is married to a striker and on the front-lines of the dispute. Her life is directly impacted by the strike, but as the story progresses, the violence of the strike and reaction to the strike provides an opportunity for her to grow as a person.

Russell is the third protagonist, who daily crosses the picket line, and provides yet another perspective on the un-civilizing impact of the strike on society. He acts as a witness, a victim, and a provocateur.

For all three of these characters, though, it’s important that they have other desires, challenges, and conflicts beyond their specific place in the social unrest. Hannah has a romantic interest as well as an unusual hobby. Nelma has to balance her allegiance to the strike with her need to keep her family safe and fed. Russell dreams of marrying and settling down with his distant girlfriend.

Minor characters provide another opportunity to mirror the larger conflict. For both major and minor characters, choices need to be made about their current or historical existence. Should actual historical or present-day characters be placed into the fictional world of the novel? Should composite characters be used that are based on one or more actual people?

This is where research can help bring factual and nuanced perspectives into a novel. Two larger than life characters who influenced the character development of my fictional characters include Big Annie Clemenc and Charles Moyer.

Annie was a six-foot two labor activist who was integral to the labor action during the strike. She led marches for striking miners, funeral processions for slain miners, gave speeches to encourage unionization, and was once convicted of assaulting a scab miner. She was the inspiration for Nelma.

Charles Moyer was the president of the Western Federation of Miners, a leading antagonist in the effort to unionize miners, and was once involved with the more radical IWW or International Workers of the World, known as the “wobblies.” He was an imperfect idealist, who was involved in both successes, failures, and questionable actions. He was the inspiration for the union organizer who stayed in Nelma’s home.

Writing a novel that includes social unrest as a central theme needs well-developed characters, who participate in both to the larger societal conflict as well as the personal struggles within their own lives. Research, imagination, and multiple levels of conflict bring these characters to life and engage readers in the societal conflict itself.

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