Who is the perfect rival to the right-person-wrong-time character in a love triangle?
I'm looking for a well balanced love triangle. The thought of a wrong-person-right-time rival seems to be weak because readers are most likely not to root for the him/her if the wrongness is obvious.
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You already have a rival: Time. Or Circumstance, or whatever your plot complication is which keeps the lovers apart because it's the Wrong Time.
Isn't it even more tragic/angsty/yearning that there's no third person keeping the two apart, just the adult recognition that the couple simply can't work out at this moment in time? That it's the choice of one or both parties that Something Else is more important than the relationship? And then the spend the rest of the arc trying to get back to one another and make it the Right Time.
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In her writing book Plot, Ansen Dibell discusses the technique of mirroring characters - two characters who are alike in many ways, and different in others. This gives you a "compare-and-contrast" effect, where the contrast between the two characters naturally creates significance and tension. This excerpt via Google Books has a lot of the section. She gives the classic example of A Christmas Carol, which compares Scrooge to past and future versions of himself - and to other characters, from Marley to Tiny Tim.
It sounds like you're looking for something similar: a good contrast to the right-guy-wrong-time; another character on a similar spectrum which will naturally create tension with your established love-interest. So, what elements can we play around with here?
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One option would be to have a different right-guy-wrong-time, who represents a different "wrong time" than the first does. If one guy would be perfect but only after the protagonist gets her career together, the second could be someone who would've been perfect if only she'd met him before she started. This turns the tension into the tension between different "versions" of your protagonist's self image - is she more at home with her past, or with her future? Can she reconcile between either of them and her actual present state?
- (A similar option would be two right-guy-wrong-time, each "corresponding" to a different possible future - for example, one that'd be perfect IF her life calms down and settles into a routine, another that'd be perfect IF it speeds up to an even more frenetic pace. This way it's a clash between "possible futures.")
Another option would be to invert the problem with right-guy-wrong-time - instead of somebody who will be terrific but not now, somebody who is terrific but at some point later, he won't be anymore. This gives you tension which is more future vs. present; immediate gratification vs. patience; opportunism vs. holding out in the hopes of still finding something good later on.
Let's try inverting along a different axis: what if the second guy is perfect for the protagonist, but for him, she's the perfect-girl-wrong-time? She finds herself at the receiving end of the same problems she has with Guy #1. Here, the tension is rather different: it becomes about what she can demand of a romantic partner, and what a partner can demand of her.
With more detail, you can dig deeper and find mirrors that are subtler or more complex. Perhaps "right-guy-wrong-time" means your protagonist has, perhaps unconsciously, a conceptual "life plan," a sense of what she expects to happen when - and this guy is coming in at the wrong step. With that view, a possible mirror is another guy who does fit the current step - but he's got the potential the disrupt "the plan" entirely; send the protagonist's life on an entirely different and less certain path. Here, the tension is your protagonist's life expectations clashing with reality, with enticing opportunity, and possibly with grave risk to her other hopes and aspirations.
These are a few examples, and I'm sure you can spin up many more. I hope they demonstrate how you can play around with mirroring to find the complement to your love triangle! I've tried to stress how the detail you stress with your mirroring is intimately tied to the central mood, tension, and conflict you want for the story or subplot.
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