Are you having trouble ratcheting up the tension in a story so your readers don’t lose interest after the first several pages?
Or maybe you’re struggling to give your protagonist a convincing character arc where her personality transforms over the course of your story so readers care about what happens to her?
Or perhaps you’re trying to weave a message into your story, but you don’t want it to sound preachy or unconvincing?
In today’s article, I’m going to show you how to solve all those problems with a storytelling technique called “the conflict triangle”.
This technique isn’t just for fiction writers. If you’re a nonfiction writer who wants to tell better stories in your ads or articles, this technique can help you too.
Prefer watching to reading? Watch the video version of this article (with bonus examples):
What is the Conflict Triangle?
Before diving into the conflict triangle, we first need to briefly overview storytelling 101.
Every compelling story has two characters. The first one is the protagonist.This is the character that has some kind of goal they’re trying to achieve over the course of the story. The more obstacles you throw in her way, the more interesting the story.
For example, let’s say that your character wants to win a race. Now, it would be a pretty boring story if she has no obstacles in her path, and she is able to run as fast as lightning and cross the finish line far ahead of the competition.
That’s where the second character comes in: the antagonist. The antagonist doesn’t necessarily have to be a person. Maybe it’s a storm or a robot or the protagonist’s own inner thoughts of low self-confidence that keep sabotaging her every time she races. All of these are antagonizing forces.
When your antagonist and protagonist come into conflict, there are two questions your story needs to answer:
1. What does the protagonist lose if the antagonist wins?
2. What does the protagonist gain if the protagonist wins?
Your answer to these questions shows what’s at stake for the protagonist. It helps the readers understand what is motivating the protagonist and why it is so important for her to defeat the antagonist.
For example, let’s say we chose a storm as the antagonizing force for our protagonist. On the day when the race is to be held, gale force winds threaten the lives of the competitors. However, our story also reveals that the protagonist doesn’t have to compete in the race that day. In fact, the race is postponed. But the protagonist goes out in the storm anyway. This might make an interesting story, but it’s not very logical unless you give a reason for the protagonist’s actions.
Maybe her child got trapped in the storm, and she has to race to find her and save her.
That’s where a third character enters the scene: the stakes character.
The stakes character becomes the embodiment of the answer to the question of what’s at stake for the protagonist. You can look at this as a triangle:
So, we have the protagonist on one side. We have the antagonist on the other side, and in the middle we have the stakes character. Maybe this looks familiar to you because you’ve seen this in the concept of the love triangle in literature and in movies.
In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby (the protagonist) is in love with Daisy Buchanan (the stakes character) who’s married to Tom Buchanan (the antagonist). In Casablanca, Rick is in love with Ilsa who’s married to Victor. In Jane Eyre, Jane is in love with Rochester and faces a number of antagonists (his wife; his dark past; and another suitor for her affections: St. John Rivers).
If the protagonist does not defeat the antagonist, he (or she) will lose (figuratively or literally) the stakes character forever.
Obviously, the love triangle is a very popular writing technique in the romance genre. But you will see the conflict triangle in many other genres as well.
In a murder mystery, for example, you usually have some sort of detective as your protagonist and, obviously, a murderer as your antagonist. Maybe the murderer kills one person, and then the detective has to figure out who committed the crime.
But the writer might want to make things a little more interesting for the protagonist and for readers. The murderer ends up being a serial killer. The detective has to catch the murderer so he doesn’t strike again. Maybe the detective finds out who the murderer is going to try to kill next: the detective’s daughter! Now we have a stakes character. The detective races against time to save the stakes character’s life.
You’ll also see this concept of the conflict triangle in other genres like the thriller genre and adventure genre. For example, in movies with a kidnapping plot like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much or Tony Scott’s Man on Fire. And you probably can recall the conflict triangle from many Marvel movies as well, like Iron Man trying to save Pepper Pots in Iron Man 3.
Ultimately, the “conflict triangle” gets you invested in the story where you understand why it’s so important for the protagonist to win. You’re cheering them on to save the stakes character.
Now, the stakes character doesn’t necessarily appear in every single story. It’s just one way to add tension to a story, and it’s also a really great way to weave a theme into your story, a message that will impact your readers on a profound level.
We’ll look at that next: how you can take this concept of the stakes character to give your story a layer of complexity.
How to Use the Conflict Triangle to Weave a Theme into Your Story
In my article about the ladder of abstraction, I discussed the importance of having some kind of message or theme in a story, a universal theme that readers can relate to. This ensures that the story isn’t just about your characters, but those characters are learning some kind of a lesson that makes your story unforgettable.
This is what makes a piece of literature endure: when it has some kind of a message that readers can take away. For example, if you think of a book like Pride and Prejudice, it was obviously written a long time ago. And, yet, it teaches this universal message of how pride can stop you from developing lasting relationships. That message is not constrained to the time period in which the book was written. It’s a lesson anyone can learn from the story. It applies to people during any time, and that’s one of the reasons why the story has endured for so long.
If you want to weave a theme into your story too, then the conflict triangle is a fantastic way to do that. However, keep in mind that often when we begin writing a story, we might not know what the ultimate message of the story is going to be. We might discover it as we’re plotting or developing our characters or even once we write the climax of our story.
But, once you discover the theme, and you really want to drive that message home for your readers, you can use the conflict triangle to weave a theme effectively into your story. (You could also use the conflict triangle to discover the theme.)
Here’s how to do that. I’ll use the example of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I’m assuming this is a story we’re all familiar with.
What’s the message of A Christmas Carol? On a basic level, we might sum it up as “the blind pursuit of money will not make a person happy or give meaning to their life, but having compassion and caring for others will.”
At the beginning of the story, Scrooge (the protagonist) is not in line with that message at all. He’s miserly and selfish. Dickens wants him to learn that lesson of compassion and selflessness over the course of the story. How to do that? With the conflict triangle!
Who’s the antagonist? Well, the antagonist needs to embody the exact opposite worldview to the story’s theme. So that’s going to be Scrooge’s own greed and coldheartedness. He needs to conquer this part of his nature by the end of the story. And he also needs to come to the conclusion that he can change and become a better man.
And the stakes character? Tiny Tim. His life is at stake in the story. And he voices the message of the story too: “God bless us, everyone.” If Scrooge doesn’t change and adopt that belief as well (to treat his fellow human beings with kindness and compassion), Tiny Tim will die.
If you’ve read the book or seen a film adaptation, you know which path Scrooge chooses.
Now, this all still might be a little abstract so check out my video where I explain this more in-depth with the films It’s a Wonderful Life and Casablanca and show several more strategies you can use to make the conflict triangle even more effective (my analysis of the films starts at 9:51).
The Takeaway
I hope the conflict triangle helps you with your writing. If you’re writing fiction, you can use it to make sure you’re raising the stakes for your protagonist and also elevating your story to have a compelling message.
And if you’re writing nonfiction, you can use it to tell more compelling stories. As a marketer, for example, the protagonist might be your client or customer. The stakes character is their goal (a better life, more money, convenience, etc.). The antagonist is the forces stopping them from achieving that goal. And your product helps them defeat the antagonist and save the stakes character.
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