May
9th
2023
Viking ZX's Nintendo’s Rule of Three · 1:12pm May 9th, 2023
You may have heard of the "rule of three" for fiction:
- A major success should follow 2 failures. This is the hero in the try-fail, try-fail, try-succeed arc of a movie, or the pattern of a fairy tale: the oldest son tries and fails, the second son tries and fails, the youngest son tries and succeeds.
- To show one thing is unusual, you must first show 2 other things of the same kind that are similar to each other. (Applicable only to things the reader isn't already familiar with, so this is most-useful in fantasy.)
Viking ZX explained something similar, but more-complex, in his recent post "Nintendo’s Rule of Three". It's for gradually introducing the reader to any multi-faceted thing or person in your story. Formulated as a video-game design principle, and now applied to fiction. Sounds useful.
It's not necessarily a try-fail/succeed thing. It's actually a very flexible format. Whether it be your try-fail/succeed idea in a long-form arc style, or a sentence-by-sentence narrative tool, you can do so much with it.
"This thing leads to this thing leads to this thing."
"One of these things is not like the others."
"Clause format A, clause format A, clause format A or B." (Or any other permutation thereof)
It's excellent for aligning, subverting, comparing, contrasting, and distinguishing multiple ideas, and when you really want to, it's just as easy a rule to break in order to further those ideas or simply for narrative variation.
I don't have the luxury of taking the link above currently to see what Viking might already have covered of what I said, but as someone who uses Rule of Three way too much, these are some of my experiences with it.
That's one thing that frustrated the heck out of me in school. "Ok, we're going to show you four ways to solve this problem. Three of them don't work, so we'll show them first, then we'll show you the one that you'll use on this kind of problem from here on and oh my we're out of time for class, bye."
This is interesting because it seems to relate directly to the old tried-and-tried piece of writerly advice, "comedy comes in threes." There seems to be something to the natural narrative rhythm of "one, then two, then WHAM."
Or Elon Musk launches three Starships, the first which fails to manoeuvre for landing, the second lands but bounces, and the third lands successfully.
And right now, Elon Musk has failed once to launch the Super Heavy: it failed to reach altitude, failed to detach, and destroyed the launchpad. One and three are the same: the lack of either a diverter or a deluge system meant that the rocket damaged itself and the launchpad by its own roar. The second I don't know and haven't been keeping up with the blurb.
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Maybe that's part of "To show one thing is unusual, you must first show 2 other things of the same kind that are similar to each other."
Comedy involves surprise; to create a surprise, you need to create an expectation.
That can be done by showing 2 similar things, then a 3rd that's different.
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In retrospect, teaching students by spending the whole class setting up incorrect expectations might not have been the best approach.
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It can be very educational to see approaches that don't work, and why they don't work. It depends on whether you want to be an engineer, or a scientist. An engineer wants a big bag of tools to apply to problems. A scientist wants to learn how to make tools.