Love triangle purposes:
1). To create friction in a relationship that developed too fast. If a writer chooses to have a romance in their plot, often they make the mistake of letting the romance take the whole show, and if the characters fall in love too fast... it gets boring... thus the common use of love triangles.
2). To keep people reading. Love triangles are the lazy writer's way of kid napping innocent hormonal teens/preteens, and forcing them to read. It's very sad.
3). To mess with peoples emotions. Writers are sons of female dogs, by nature... but there's other ways people. Honestly, it's dub to mess with your readers when it comes to love triangles, because you'll lose peoples faith ( above all, write what you enjoy... ).
Why you should not write love triangles:
As I said above, it's lazy to use love triangles. Why's that? Because if your story needs a love triangle, you probably didn't either keep your characters apart long enough, or the romance is, well, lame and cheesy. There's also other ways to create friction ( which in my opinion are just as lazy ). One way is to just have a real conflict... nothing says conflict like conflict! For intense, people often make their characters have a big fight about whatever, and they stop talking to one another... I find that completely ridiculous, because I've only ever known five year olds to do that... But if you keep that as an alternative, and if you don't use the typical example that I just explained to you, then it can work, I would imagine.
But let's step back for a minute, and ask ourselves- Why does my story have a romance? If you're answer is because my characters are meant to be together, Or every story needs a love story, Or that's kind of the foundation of my story... then you might want to reconsider your plot!
Alright, the genre romance is actually not too bad, there actually is some pretty good books that fall into that category... but that's because they're interesting and original. The kind of love stories I see these days, are all the same: Some girl thinks she's not good enough for this really hot guy, said guy apparently really does like her, and after a long amount of second guessing ones self, they all get together and lives happily to the end of the book.
Even if you have a remotely interesting idea, your love story should never steal the show! Unless it's a romance...
Just don't use love triangles, or romance to control your audience, because it's rude... and if anyone else is like me, they'll find themselves a bit angry at the end of your story! Not sure why this is, but you know, it feels like you just got robed. Robed of what you thought would be a good read, robed of your time, robed of your patience, etc.
I haven't seen too many love triangles floating around YWS, but I just felt the need to post this... it's kind of a rant I guess!
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