TC Boyle Week # 6–Scott Russell Sanders stops by to teach RULE OF 3

In North America, in English, people love the sound of items in groups of three: Goldilocks and the 3 bears, 3 Little Pigs, 3 Billy Goats Gruff…but we even like the sound of simples lists of three. Many writers know this, and Scott Russell Sanders is one of them. Here are a few examples of what some call RULE OF 3, from a creative nonfiction piece Sanders wrote, called “Under the Influence: Paying the Price of My Father’s Booze”:

…he stashes the bottle or can inside his jacket, under the workbench, between two bales of hay, and we both pretend the moment has not occurred.

Notice the parallelism here:

inside his jacket / under the workbench / between two bales of hay

Each of these three parts is a prepositional phrase; all three are in a list and are in the same grammatical form.

Now let’s look at another example from the same work:

He climbs out, grinning dangerously, unsteady on his legs, and we children interrupt our game of catch, our building of snow forts, our picking of plums, to watch in silence as he weaves past us into the house, where he drops into his overstuffed chair and falls asleep.

Notice that in the two examples above, Sanders is using RULE OF 3 to condense time. It is on separate occasions, in different places, in various seasons of the year that the children catch him drinking. The sense readers get is that this guy will drink anywhere at any time.

So why are we bringing Sanders in during T. C. Boyle week? Because of what’s coming tomorrow. In our final posting of this first week, we’ll look at BENDING THE RULE OF 3, the way both Sanders AND Boyle do, as part of their personal style.

Watch for that tomorrow!