Rules of Three
A Whole Lot of Rules to Break
Let’s talk about rules of three. In keeping with the three theme of today’s Shelf Life, I’m going to talk about three rules of three. According to math that’s nine something, or possibly six. Or twenty-seven. I’m afraid there is going to be some math involved.
So: A while back in Shelf Life I mentioned offhand the rule of three—the one that applies to and is about writing, that is—which is to say, people like it when things in stories come in threes. I will elaborate on this more. But first I want to note that a friend who reads posted a comment I think, or we had a chat about it, or both, and they raised the question of: Do people universally really like things to come in threes, or is that an artifact of Christianity permeating the population given that religion’s mythos is all about the number three?
I go looking into this a bit and the more examples I find of “the rule of three” playing out in stories and literature are, indeed, almost all from the white, Christian, Eurocentric storytelling tradition. European Christians aren’t the only folks who find the number three pleasing and significant, there are lots of other cultural groups who dig the number three, but I want to put a big caveat on talking about the rule of three for writing which is: I can’t assume this is a principle universal to all people everywhere. However, the rule of three has a long and successful history in the tradition of storytelling in English, which is the language I write in, so I’m still going to talk about it.
The rule of three for writing isn’t the only rule of three. I’m going to talk about that one, but also the rule of three in visual art (briefly), and then I’m going to talk a little bit about this rule of three for organizing one’s time that I came across and I thought was neat, probably because I come from a Christian background—though I am, myself, an atheist—and so I was raised with all this three mythology.
I’ve mentioned in Shelf Life before that I went to art school once upon a time and we learned about a similar rule there, though we didn’t call it the rule of three, we called it the rule of thirds, which is really just splitting hairs I think. The idea is that when you’re composing a painting or a photograph or whatever image you’re making, you split your canvas or frame or whatever into thirds both horizontally and vertically (so into nine cells, like a tic-tac-toe board), and then try to place the important points of your image along those lines. Put another way, you’re trying to place the most visually interesting parts of your composition at the top, bottom, right, or left third of the canvas because they have more impact there.
If you go to art school you will never again take a photo with your subject in the center and people will be asking you for the rest of your life why your photos are always off center like that; it’s art school’s fault. I’m just kidding, I worked at a portrait studio taking pictures of kids for a couple of years while I was in college, which retrained me on centering the subject of my photos. Sorry art school teachers.
If you think about it, we tend to split stories into thirds as well; beginning, middle end; act 1, act 2, act 3; exposition, climax, denouement. Again, I can’t speak for every culture’s methods of storytelling but in English these are pretty common ways to break down stories into component parts and make writing them more digestible (reading them too, I guess?).
In writing, there is a related concept to the rule of thirds, which is the rule of three: Three of anything is the right number; two is not enough and four or more is too many. Three fairy godmothers, three wishes from the genie, three tries to guess Rumpelstilskin’s name over three days, three little pigs (and three attempts to blow down their house!), Goldilocks’s three bears, and so on.
Three feels like a very satisfying payoff number to a lot of readers. When there are two of any element, the repetition may be chalked up to an accident; when there are more than three of any element, the reader may start to get bored with too much repetition. Three is exactly the right number.
There’s another concept called hendiatris, in which you express one idea using three words (for example, “friends, Romans, countrymen” to mean “all y’all”); and its sister-in-arms, the tripartite motto (“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!”).
The easiest way to employ this in fiction writing, in my opinion, is to go back to the most basic element of plot. Plot is a series of actions through which a story is told. Also consider: Plot is the series of obstacles that come between the protagonist and what they want. Every protagonist wants something. There’s something they know they want and then there’s also something they need that they probably don’t know they need—that’s the personal growth and development they’ll go through during the story.
So, like, Frodo Baggins wants to get rid of some heirloom jewelry. This is what the protagonist wants. The plot of The Lord of the Rings trilogy consists of a long series of obstacles that come between Frodo and his goal of throwing away this ring. Frodo also needs to develop into the hero he was meant to be by growing past all the hero archetypes he’s confronted with and put faith in his own, innate hobbit virtues.
When I say obstacles I don’t mean we’re counting every rock and vine Frodo tripped on on the way to the finish line as a separate obstacle. A lot more than three things happen in that story. But consider that the main obstacles that derail Frodo’s journey are (A) the trip into the Mines of Moria; (B) the incident in Shelob’s lair; and (C) the escape from Cirith Ungol.
The Lord of the Rings is also deeply influenced by Tolkien’s Christian beliefs; the three-ness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I’m just taking an example from a story a lot of people know.
To sum up, if you’re writing and you find yourself wondering: “Do I have enough of…? Do I have too much of…?” The answer is, if you don’t have three of something, the answer is you have not enough or too much probably.
Last third of this Shelf Life is to talk about this other rule of three I just stumbled upon, the 3:3:3 plan for productivity, which could be used as guidance for writing productivity. I saw a meme about it on Instagram or someplace, and the source was cited as British writer Oliver Burkeman, who has it turns out has plenty to say about threes (eg, “Three Pages a Day” and “The Three-or-Four-Hours Rule”). I was not able to find the edition of his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, in which he describes the 3:3:3 plan but I’ve found it summarized many other places and attributed to him; so I’ll summarize it again here.
Spend three hours (per day) on your most important project.
Accomplish three shorter tasks.
Devote some time to three maintenance activities.
I liked this because it got me thinking: In my writing life, what are my:
Most important projects?
Shorter, smaller but discrete tasks?
Maintenance activities?
I’m pretty clear on projects, which are the stories I want to write. What are the smaller tasks and the maintenance activities, though? It got me thinking about writing administrivia (as my mom says)—the pesky administrative tasks that go along with anything—which to me include things like organizing my filing system when it gets messy and transcribing the results of story submissions into the spreadsheet I use to keep track of rejections. But also it’s things like—cleaning my writing workspace so it doesn’t get cluttered and demotivate me; reviewing Publishers Weekly and whatever’s going on today on #writing Twitter; and making notes on what I’ve read lately so I don’t forget whatever I learned from reading it.
What constitute the self-contained, important task that are smaller than “writing a complete story” but don’t fall into the “maintenance tasks” category? I came up with a list that includes:
Coming up with new ideas and putting them in the idea bucket.
Reviewing my list of desirable publications, anthologies, and contests for open or upcoming submission windows.
Actually submitting manuscripts to those publications.
Revising and editing.
Reading books on craft.
I like this 3:3:3 rule, or at least I like the idea of it, because it’s a reminder that we can’t spend all the productive time we have on the thing we’re passionate about without devoting some personal resources to the smaller-but-still-important tasks and the maintenance activities that keep the trains running and help prevent overwhelm and eventually burnout.
If you want to write, and only write—not revise, not edit, not participate in beta read swaps or writing groups, not query agents, and so on—that’s totally fine. Realistically that means you have a different goal than someone who wants to write for successful publication, because they’ll have to be doing some or all of those other activities, but writing for successful publication is not the only reason to write. Writing for your own fulfillment is also a perfectly valid reason to write.
When I say I like the 3:3:3 rule in concept, it’s because the “three hours on your most important project” seems like quite a lift if you’re doing it daily (or “dailyish,” another of Oliver Burkeman’s concepts that I really like). I have more free time than most people and I spend a lot of time writing compared to most people but three hours a day would not be possible for me, realistically. I could spend three hours a day on my most important project at work but I don’t have three hours a day after you subtract sleeping eight hours and working eight hours to spend on my most important writing project on top of also doing three smaller writing-related tasks, and three maintenance task, and feeding myself, taking a shower, caring for my dogs, and breathing.
I don’t think that’s what Burkeman intended—just noting for the record that (like anything else) this strategy will have to be adapted to what’s realistic for anyone given the other things they have going on.
For myself, I might rechristen it yet another rule of thirds and say: Of my creative time, try to spend roughly one third on a big project, one third on smaller tasks, and one third on maintenance activities.
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