9 Ways to Approach Relationship Dynamics in Fiction

Creating an amazing supporting cast that can offer important relationship dynamics in fiction will also help develop your protagonist. This isn’t just because great supporting characters will add color, drama, and nuance to your story in their own right. It’s also because every supporting character in your story has the ability to bring out new dimensions and complexities within your exploration of your protagonist.

The primary way this is done is simply through the relationship dynamics between your protagonist and other characters. Mary Carolyn Davies’ famous wedding poem “Love” suggests:

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

Arguability of the notion’s simplicity aside, this does offer a perspective on how a person tends to be at least slightly different in every different relationship. Different people bring out different facets of our personalities. This should hold true for our protagonists as well.

I was pondering this recently after experiencing a random memory of The Andy Griffith Show. My family watched this classic sit-com over and over and over again when I was young, so I kinda tend to see the world through a Mayberry-tinted haze. (My sister and I slay at the game Taboo when we’re on the same side; all we need is an Andy Griffith reference to communicate telepathically: “You remember when Barney tried to invite Thelma Lou on a date but Opie answered the phone?” “Duck pond!”)

Anyway, not to digress, but my random musing was about how hapless deputy Barney Fife’s every relationship in this show served to bring out a different dynamic within his personality, always to comedic effect. His relatively healthy friendship with his boss Andy showed him as a (mostly) respectful subordinate. But whenever he’d deputize the even more hapless Gomer, he’d turn into a mini-tyrant. More conscious characters like Andy would rarely bump Barney’s fragile ego or antagonize him, but others like town drunk Otis refused to play along with Barney’s delusions of grandeur and would unhesitatingly initiate schoolyard-esque squabbles. Even Barney’s sweet relationship with his official girlfriend Thelma Lou was different from the pseudo-suave persona he used with his “telephone” girlfriend Juanita.

Part of why this example is so fun—and obvious—is that Barney was an extremely unstable personality who switched personas frequently in order to try to boost or cover up his own raging insecurity. But even with a more mature character, the opportunities are just as rich for dramatizing different facets within different relationships.

A Few Different Approaches to Character Dynamics

Other than just trying to make “every relationship different,” there are also a few more strategic approaches for diversifying your protagonist’s personality via his interactions with other characters.

The Three Primary Characters—and Their Proxies

One of my favorite lenses for examining the roles of characters within plot and theme is to remember there are really only three types of character in any story.

1. Protagonist

2. Antagonist

3. Relationship Character

The protagonist is the central character, whose actions drive the forward progression of the plot. The resolution of this character’s goal (in the story or, on a smaller scale, in any given scene) determines the shape of the story.

The antagonist is the character (or characters or entity) who opposes the protagonist’s forward momentum in the story or in any scene.

And the relationship character is the character who in some way inspires or impacts the protagonist’s motives, actions, and growth.

Obviously, most stories contain far more than just three characters. But if you view your cast through this lens, you will begin to discover the core purpose of any character’s role in your story. Theoretically, every character in a tight story will be one of these three—or represent one of the main three by acting as a proxy in some way. The relationship character, especially, may be “divided” into different characters who can thematically represent different motivating or driving factors to the protagonist (e.g., parent, love interest, child, etc.).

Truby’s 4-Sided Conflict

In his book The Anatomy of Story, John Truby speaks of “four-sided conflict,” which he illustrates as a rectangle, with a different character at each corner and arrows connecting them all. His idea of story’s relational conflict is that it should not be isolated to simply the protagonist and the antagonist. Rather, every character in the story should be in conflict (whether large or small) with every other character.

This doesn’t mean everyone needs to hate each other and be in open war. But even within friendships and loving families, power dynamics (and sometimes outright struggles) are always at play. Even when we are on the best of terms with someone else, we still want something from that person and that person wants something from us. But what you want from your mother is not the same thing you want from your boss, and what you want from your boss is not the same thing you want from the gas-station attendant. The dynamic is different in every case.

By keeping this in mind and remembering that all supporting characters are a universe unto themselves—with their own burning needs, desires, and weaknesses, same as your protagonist—you can keep tabs on how each unique character might in turn bring out something unique in your protagonist.

Parallel Characters

Screenwriter Matt Bird uses the phrase “parallel characters” to describe how each supporting character should mirror something in the protagonist You can also zoom this out a bit and examine how each supporting character can represent the thematic premise in a different way. This gives the protagonist the opportunity to interact with many different moral, philosophical, and practical facets of the central dilemma, which can be dramatized via his or her own strong reactions to these other characters.

6 Different Polarities to Explore in Relationship Dynamics in Fiction

Here are six simple but powerful dynamics you can explore by creating unique relationship dynamics in fiction between your protagonist and the supporting cast. Each is a polarity, a set of opposites. If you can figure out a way to realistically create competing relationships in which your protagonist alternately plays either role, you might find out some things even you didn’t know about your characters!

1. Friend/Enemy

We all need friends, but most protagonists will find at least a few enemies as well. This is usually the most obvious relational polarity in fiction, since we tend to think of conflict in terms of enemies and allies. Regardless what type of story you’re writing and which category is emphasized, be sure you offer a contrast. More than that, consider how your protagonist will interact with each category. He’ll be comfortable with a friend character, but uncomfortable or even aggressive with an enemy character. One gets his love and devotion (or not?); the other gets his resistance or worse. However high or low the stakes, the protagonist’s mode of interaction between these two types of supporting character will be wildly different.

2. Superior/Subordinate

Like our friend Barney Fife, it’s probable your protagonist will encounter some supporting characters who are her superiors and others over whom she herself wields authority. How is she different in these different relationships? Is she respectful to both her superiors and her subordinates? Is she more responsible to one or the other? Does one or the other bring out her insecurities and her ego-defense tactics? The point isn’t that she needs to response well to one person and badly to the other. But if you can emphasize a difference of some kind, you’ll find the hidden complexity.

3. Attack/Defend/Withdraw

These are three common relational reactions. Examine which is your protagonist’s favored mode when under pressure. But also examine your supporting characters. If they’re all reacting with the same mechanism, that’s a missed opportunity for depth. Moreover, there may be reasons why your protagonist (or other characters) choose different tactics in different scenarios. You don’t want to be too random here, but it can be powerfully revealing when a character whose default mode is to “attack,” suddenly chooses to instead “withdraw.”

4. Passive/Aggressive

As we explored earlier this year in our lengthy series about the shadow polarities of various archetypes, most unbalanced responses fall into one of two categories: passive or aggressive. Which does your protagonist favor? And which do your supporting characters prefer? Obviously, the passive/aggressive polarity falls into line with the above categorization of “withdraw/attack.” I would tend to put the classic designation of passive-aggressive (as a third category) in line with “defend” (not in the sense of defending healthy boundaries, but rather in the sense of being “defensive” in a reactionary way).

5. Positive/Negative

Is your protagonist the type whose initial response is more likely to be “yes” or “no”? Does he see his interactions with other people as if the world were half full or half empty? (And, note, that the two questions don’t necessarily align.) We can add “realist” as a third option, although in this context I would differentiate it as simply someone who is centered and does not use a determinedly negative or positive mindset in a reactionary or defensive way. Characters who favor either positivity or negativity can be used to exaggerated and comedic effect, but played with more subtlety they can simply be used to challenge your protagonist’s moods and views in different relationship dynamics.

6. Confident/Insecure

Can’t use Barney Fife as an example without bringing up this one. We all have insecurities, although some of us mask them (even from ourselves) better than others, but we can depend on its being a sliding scale. Examine your protagonist and the characters surrounding her. The interesting question isn’t so much “Who is more insecure than the others?” but rather “How do they each exhibit, cover up, or compensate for their individual insecurities?” And how might their insecurities—or lack thereof—interact with other characters’ insecurities?

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Because all characters in a book ultimately arise from one personality—the author’s—it can be easy to miss opportunities for adding complexity to your cast. Simply in noticing whether or not every character interacts with the protagonist a little differently, you can begin to observe where your characters may be a little too homogeneous and how you can increase both complexity and realism.

Wordplayers, tell me your opinions! How do some of your supporting characters bring out different relationship dynamics in fiction? Tell me in the comments!

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