TELLING TRUE STORIES: A NONFICTION WRITERS' GUIDE
 edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call is a treasure trove for writers with any interest in narrative. The opening piece by Jacqui Banasynski brought tears as she shifted from describing effects of famine in Ethiopia, including digging shallow graves, for not much dirt was needed to cover thin babies, to an account of the starving people singing stories every night, through the coughing and keening. I loved Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo’s remarks about how her career developed in part from having never learned to drive, so she took the bus, looked out the windows, and made unexpected stops. She mentioned that while it’s painful to omit stories that took hard work to find, she’s learned that “three well-articulated, nuanced examples – backed by sharply documented evidence of a broader problem – are far better than twenty examples that raise more questions than they answer.”

I learned something from almost every writer in this collection, but what struck me was that while none mentioned fairy tales with three bears, three beans, three spins around, or three wishes, several alluded to the power of that number. In "What Narrative Writers Can Learn From Screenwriters,” Nora Ephron tells us that Martin Scorsese says that the dream movie scene is three people in a room, and how she used this writing the film Silkwood, focusing on the whistle-blower Karen, her roommate, and her boyfriend, while piecing together where to begin and end and ways to keep up tension through the middle.

Jon Franklin writes about the three layers of stories: the events, ways the characters react to what happens, and a rhythm that evokes the story’s universal theme. He writes of how this seems backed by the work of neuroanatomist Paul MacLean with what he called triume brain, finding that we all have a brain that is cognitive, another that registers emotion, and another rhythm. Other writers here also mention layers of what happens and an emotional response, but instead of something musical they cite a hope to evoke why the story matters, what it all means, perhaps how the particular tale connects to the greater world.

Three objects on a page can give us the satisfaction of symmetry, but is also dynamic, whereas two by two, side by side, can leave us unmoved. Three is a good number to remember and isn’t just for those who like magic, trilogies, the trinity, tercets, sky-land-and-sea, or the Fates. I’ll be thinking of ways layers can unfold as I look ways for concrete and abstract to meet, while getting back to my own untrue story. It strikes me that triangles can have the enduring nature of circles, while being less cozy. Have you encountered the tug of three in an unexpected place?