How to write a love triangle

Although readers love a well-written love triangle, writing one is easier said than done. Love triangles that aren’t carefully plotted often end up predictable and clichéd. But when well developed and carefully thought out, love triangles can be great, moving plot devices that strengthen your story.

What is a love triangle?

A love triangle is a relationship between three characters. Typically, one character has to choose between two other characters who are interested in them. Sometimes, the two characters who are interested in the first also have some kind of relationship. Sometimes they don’t.

Examples of popular fictional love triangles include Twilight’s Bella, Edward, and Jacob; Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth, Mr Darcy, and Mr Wickham; and Bridgerton’s Anthony, Kate, and Edwina.

10 tips to write a compelling love triangle

Here are 10 tips to help you write an effective love triangle that hooks readers. Follow these tips to avoid falling into the clichéd triangle trap.

1. Develop all three characters in the love triangle

Your reader needs to care about all three characters for the love triangle to work. If you don’t develop your characters, they’ll feel two-dimensional and fall flat. So, give each character their own goals, motivations, hopes, fears, perspectives and personality traits.

Building your characters this way will give them foundations for the ways they respond to the story events and the issues posed by the love triangle.

2. Make both suitors tempt the protagonist

The protagonist should have believable reasons for liking both of their suitors and believable reasons why they can’t choose one over the other right away.

If there’s an obvious ‘wrong choice’ between their suitors, you won’t be able to build suspense over who your protagonist chooses, and your story will be predictable.

3. Avoid too much back and to between love interests

Although your main character should find it difficult to choose between their suitors, if they keep going back and forth between these characters without any real resolution, readers will get bored.

It’s important to develop a plot that doesn’t simply constitute character A shifting from characters B to C and back again without anything else really happening.

4. Make sure your protagonist makes an active choice in the end

Don’t make your protagonist’s choice between their suitors easy. If one of the suitors dies or meets someone else, your protagonist isn’t making an active choice, which squeezes all the tension and suspense out of your story. Don’t give them only one way out. Their decision needs to direct the story.

5. Make your protagonist’s choice reveal something about them

When your protagonist does choose between their love interests, this decision should reveal something bigger about them. What does choosing this person represent on a larger scale? Choosing a suitor should inform who the protagonist wants to be.

6. Think about when the protagonist should meet their suitors

Remember that the protagonist’s relationships with the suitors don’t have to start at the same time. Sometimes, a protagonist might have developed feelings for one character before they even meet the second.

This approach works well if you want your protagonist to choose between a long-term partner who they love deeply and a new, unknown character with who they feel chemistry and newfound sexual attraction.

7. Raise the stakes

Make sure your protagonist has something to lose and something to gain depending on which suitor they choose. Their life should change dramatically either way. This way, you can raise the stakes and make readers care about what happens. Readers need to feel the weight of this decision.

8. Make sure the love triangle isn't the only focus of the story

In a romance novel, the love triangle might be the main aspect of the story – but it shouldn’t be the only aspect. In a thriller, the love triangle might be the B plot. Either way, don’t let the love triangle be the only focus of your novel. Make sure you have substance and intertwining story threads.

9. Have a real reason for including a love triangle

This point follows on from the last. Your love triangle shouldn’t exist only to add drama. How does the triangle affect the rest of the plot? Why do you need it to exist in the story? Does the outcome affect the theme? When your protagonist chooses which suitor they want to be with, the whole story should shift.

10. Explore different types of conflict

Make sure you explore different types of conflict in your love triangle. Perhaps most importantly, your characters should experience internal conflict (where they battle with themselves over what to do) and external conflict (where they endure disagreements with others). Make sure these conflicts ripple through the story’s events to build tension.

Write your love triangle

Hopefully these tips will help you write the tension-filled love triangle your short story or novel needs. If you need more help, take a look at my line editing service.

About Charlotte

Charlotte is an award-winning writer and line/copyeditor who writes and edits for clients all over the world. She also works on the fiction team for Ambit, a UK literary and arts magazine.

She holds an international literary prize from Hammond House Publishing Group, two writing-related degrees, various marketing certifications, and training certificates from the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, of which she is a Professional Member.

Charlotte’s work has appeared in several anthologies, magazines, and literary journals, including Indigomania, Dream Catcher, and The Curlew.

She has also created a series of free self-editing cheat sheets to help new writers hone their fiction before sending their work off to a professional editor.