TC Boyle Week #7–Sanders and Boyle BEND the Rule of 3!

          Touch gloves–Sanders meets Boyle today. Yesterday, we saw Rule of 3, a common technique employed by MANY writers, especially those who write in English. There’s something about the rhythms it creates that are pleasing to the ear.

          Today, we’re going to see how both Sanders and Boyle BEND that rule. First, I’ll show you how Sanders does it. To be brief, what he does is he mucks with the parallelism of the third part. Here’s an example:

He drank as a gut-punched boxer gasps for breath, as a starving dog gobbles food-compulsively, secretly, in pain and trembling.

          The first two parts, in blue, are both adverbs. He makes the third (which English teachers would tell you SHOULD be “fearfully”) a prepositional phrase. He sets up a pattern and then disturbs it. Here are a few more examples from Sanders:

That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling, slumped and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer.

…I slip into the garage or barn to see my father tipping back the flat green bottles of wine, the brown cylinders of whiskey, the cans of beer disguised in paper bags.

          How easy would it be for him to say “the silver cans of beer”? If he did so, it would be a great example of Rule of 3. But every once in a while, he likes to mix things up, and he does it so frequently, that I would say it’s definitely a part of his style.

          Then, when I was reading T. C. Boyle’s “The Night of the Satellite,” the short story we’re dissecting technique from this week, look at what I found:

And that was how we found ourselves out in that dark field on the night of the satellite, letting things spill out of us, angry things, hurtful things, things that made me want to leave her to the mosquitoes and go off and rent a room on the other side of town and never talk to her again.

          Sanders, meet Boyle. Boyle? Sanders. And, if you’d like, you should meet them too…

Try this:

          Find some examples of Rule of 3–in your own writing, or in the writing of others. Then, try to muck with the third part and see if you can keep the sentence strong while doing so. Then put this tool in your writer’s toolbox and take it out again when you’re looking for a bit of variety in just that right spot.

          Well, that’s it for our T. C. Boyle week. I hope you’ve found something useful. Next week will be a bit of a mishmash of things, including, for the first time, speed bag work–look for it, watch for it and in the meantime, remember to FIGHT TO WRITE!

Tomorrow: After reading about a Contender, Amy Sue Nathan, you’ll get inspired and discover why you have NO excuses for not putting pen to paper. See you tomorrow!