Someone (who might resemble this guy) wants me to pontificate about what triangles have to do with stories. Ooookay…

 

In story structure, you want triangles: romantic triangles, villain triangles, hero triangles. Having a fourth corner and fitting it in can cause pacing/revelation issues.

To explain what I mean: take Star Wars. Family triangle 1: Luke, Owen, Beru. Family triangle 2: Vader, Luke, Leia. Family triangle 3: Leia, Han, Kylo.

Hero triangle: Luke, Han/Chewie, Obiwan. But also the romantic triangle of Luke, Han, Leia, who are all human, with Chewie part of a non-human triangle with C3PO and R2D2. Obiwan is a fourth point, once the heroes are escaping the Death Star: Luke, Obiwan, Han/Chewie, Leia … and Obiwan dies. This is inevitable, because Han/Chewie are a set pair, Luke is the main character, and Leia is the main love interest. Obiwan is the only one who CAN die.

Well, Obiwan could have just left, but where’s the drama in that? And having him captured would have been repeating Leia’s arc. So death it is.

But there’s a training triangle: Luke, Obiwan, Yoda. Which has an earlier incarnation in Anakin, Obiwan, Qui-gon Jinn. And a later one in Luke, Kylo, Rey.

Villain triangle: Vader, Palpatine, Darth Maul. Jabba, Han, Bobba Fett. Or, for that matter, Darth Vader, Darth Maul, Darth Sidious.

(Yes, Han fits the villain mode. After all, he shot first … it was a boring conversation!)

And really big triangles, such as the Empire, the Rebellion, and ‘neither’ (independents like Corellian smugglers.)

I could go on. Note that members may overlap between triangles, and when they do, there is normally only one character overlapping. Note that a group, such as ‘the Rebellion’ or the Han/Chewie set pair, may be a point of a triangle.

Detective, victim, perpetrator. Prince, evil stepmother, princess. Gunslinger, sheriff, school marm. Triangles are everywhere in characters.

A killing, a search, a confrontation. A request, a refusal, an acceptance. A meeting, a getting to know each other, a marriage. Those are plot triangles.

But why triangles?

Humans are a species which recognizes patterns. We see them everywhere — including in things such as the stars, in tea leaves, and in the rolls of dice, where random chance is at work. Even to random things, we assign meanings to these patterns, and agency, and direction. Pure randomness is anathema, because it is chaos — it has no pattern, no shape, no way for us to grasp it and understand it… or to use it, or be safe from it.

It takes a minimum of three things make a pattern. Usually Element One, Element Two, and then Element Three which bends, breaks, or confirms the pattern implied with the first two mentions.

But why three? Why not two, or four, or eleven?

Well, it has to do with counting, balance, and tension.

Two is the minimum number for confrontation, but it tends to be binary: there are two possible outcomes. Person A wins, or Person B wins. Or both win, or both lose. Such possibilities are easy to predict — there is no surprise. Where there is no surprise, there is no tension. (Readers of romance may differ with me here, but then, I suspect readers of romance aren’t reading for ‘Will they or won’t they?’ but more for ‘How will they?’)

Anyway, you therefore want more than two elements in your triangle.

Harry Houdini used to invite audience members up onto the stage to investigate his set-ups before he did his tricks. He’d have a dozen people look them over and say yes, this is what he said it was, and that is, too. Then they’d go back down into the audience and he’d do his trick and wow them all.

But … not all of the audience members would return to their seats. One would be a plant, and would stay on stage and help Houdini create his illusion. And the reason why this worked for Houdini over and over again is because most people don’t sight-count above seven, and almost none are capable of sight-counting twelve, unless they concentrate on doing so. This is also true for readers tracking story threads. So you need seven or fewer elements in play if you want your audience — your readers — to remember the important ones easily.

With three main characters/elements, you have six relationships to keep track of: A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, and C to B. With four elements, you have twelve. With five, twenty. With six …

But according to the principle of sight-counting, you want seven or fewer relationships to track per set. So, three elements. A triangle.

Tension and balance come into it because people are not hypothetically spherical primates of evenly distributed density. In short, they are seldom equal. If you put one on each end of a rope and tell them to pull, then the likely results are either the strong one hauls the weaker into the puddle between them or they both dig in and do nothing much. Both are boring; the first because it is too easy a resolution, the second because there is no resolution.

But … tie the ropes into a triangle, put someone on each point, and then … who wins? The strongest, because he pulls both other corners to him? Does the strongest lose, because the two weaker gang up on her? Maybe there are two strong points and the issue is convincing the weak point to join a side. Or desert a side. Or maybe the third finds a knife to cut the rope with and backlash happens …

Even in ostensibly two-person stories, there is an implied third: the reader. Tension is maintained because the reader wants an outcome which may not be possible …

I could go on, and likely will … in a different blog post. But for now, just know that writing things in threes isn’t a bad way to structure your story.

Me, I have a tendency to go against the grain and write in fives and sevens and … well, ridiculous. But that’s a different blog post, too!

 

Twitter is busy today letting everyone know why everyone writes. Some people do it for self and some do it for others. Some do it to persuade and others do it to express. Still others have odder reasons that stand beside or blend or ignore all of the above.

But me …

One of my first memories is sitting at the dining room table in my grandparent’s house. A filing cabinet full of paper and pencils and crayons sat in the corner, behind the table, and I was free to occupy myself with them whenever I wanted, for as long as I wanted — or until dinner time, whichever came first. I drew pictures of bugs and trees and the window, a frame through which a world might be presented.

That feeling persisted when I went to school, when I sat at a desk with a pen in my hand and wrote notes. And doodled in the margins, of course … and those doodles had captions, eventually. The captions grew to become portions of stories, of dialogue and description and plot.

The feeling hasn’t faded, even though I’ve switched from pens to keyboards, from paper to the bright white screen of a computer. My grandparents have been gone for many years, but every time I sit down to create, to pass the images in my head to the page in front of me, I feel them still, as if I am still at that dining room table, and they are still in the kitchen, in the office, in the garden, doing their thing while I do mine.

And that, ultimately, is why I write. Because it is as much a part of me as they were, and are, and always will be.