I was at a literary gathering about a month or two ago and had just decamped to the pub with a group of others. I fell into conversation with one of the few non-poets in the pub – he turned out to be a fellow programmer so we had some common topics of discussion I won’t geek-bore the rest of you with. He happened to mention he knew someone who had difficulty writing essays and I replied without thinking, “She needs the Rule of Three”.
When questioned about this Rule, I explained that when exposing an argument, one need to have an introduction, three points for the argument in question, and a conclusion. Afterwards, I thought about it a little more and realised that the rule of three happens again and again in storytelling. When Milton’s Satan is about to give his big speech to the fallen angels, the poet is careful to say “Thrice he assayed” as opposed to “once” or “five times” (in which case one would wonder if Lucifer had had an unlikely case of stage fright.) When Psyche is trying to win Cupid back from his jealous mother Aphrodite, she must undergo three ordeals. The story of Goldilocks has three little bears. The human mind appears to like the pattern of three and it occurs again and again. In Japanese tradition, four is the number of death, which is obviously taking a good thing too far by adding one on to it!
So how can we apply this to a short story. Well it can be a useful structure to shoehorn in an idea – if we have max 3,000 words to play with and a single narrating character who experiences a change in the process of the story, we could have something like this:
1. Character intro, in the middle of some environment or activity, in readiness for the flow of events to occur
2. First event
3. Second event
4. Reveal
5. Final, concluding event
What is the reveal? Well, the events will be acting on some vulnerability in the character – so what makes her vulnerable. What is her backstory? How do the current events reach back to the “reveal” in the past?
Of course it is always possible to put the events in the past and the “reveal” in the present – then it would be more like a consequence of past events. In either case, the final event would be the resolution / catastrophe of the story.
This might seem a rather tight and artificial way of writing short fiction – but it does impose narrative structure on what might be an inchoate idea. If you have something kicking around and are looking for a way to get it down on paper in 3,000 words or less, the Rule of Three might help you.
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