Chapter 108: Rule of Thirds

My wife invited me along to her college newspaper reunion a few weeks ago, and to paraphrase the opening of Moby Dick, having nothing particular to interest me at home, I decided to tag along. 

Glad I did because had I not gone I would have missed coffee with three wise people – two classmates and another accompanying spouse – all academics, all really really really smart, all writers.

It was not their writing, per se, that caught me up: one of them admitted that he wrote a 1000-page book every nineteen years, which brought to mind something a friend’s voracious reader of a father said about waiting to read Proust until he became a political prisoner.

What made the weekend was the hour or so we spent huddled around a table in a loud and crowded coffee shop as they told stories. The subject was, how best to put, on the obscure side: Brazilian leftist politics of the 1930s. Only my wife, the best student in the history of education, might criticize herself for her lack of knowledge on the subject. Me? Ignorant as sin.

But no matter. It took no time at all for the back and forth to accelerate to a speed that left my head snapping from side to side like a spectator at Wimbledon. Did you know about this one? No, not that one. That one didn’t matter as much as this one. And did you know who she was married to? Yeah, but did you know the story about…?

While the names and particulars eluded me, there was something illuminating about the way the conversation unfolded: they were helping each other make their stories better.

This was not intentional, and I do not mean that as a criticism. Their banter had taken a gentle but palpable competition, a succession of one-ups that forced each of them to lift their game.

I know no more now about 1930s Brazilian politics than I did before that afternoon. But thinking back to their spirited exchange, I am struck by how much writers lose when they don’t have the company of other writers.

My students graduate next week and I hope that I have helped them close the gap between the stories they tell and the stories they write. There is no greater challenge for a writing teacher, and at times it can feel Sisyphean. Something happens, not always good, when the metaphorical klieg lights come on and the writing begins. 

Memos help, as do letters you write to yourself. But it took a rapid fire exchange on pre-war Brazilian politics to remind me how competition – what soccer fans euphemistically call a “friendly” – can bring out the best in writers.

I had, in fact, heard many similar exchanges over the years –  particularly in interviews with a small group of people in which the participants egg each other on, and doing so make the reporting fuller, deeper, and richer. But until that afternoon in the coffee shop I had never appreciated the good things that come when people are talking, seemingly all at once. 

Call it the Rule of Thirds.

Consider: when two people talk it is often the case that the rules of conversation allows for each to take a turn. Interruptions happen, but are, ideally, kept to a minimum. But add a third person and things begin to change: Person A says something. Person B replies. Person C replies to either Person A or Person B, or offers something new, to which Persons A or B then comments on. 

What had been a back and forth within certain parameters – from a catching up, to a confessional, to a full bore fight – becomes, by comparison, chaotic. 

Except it’s not. Comments get shorter because interruptions become more frequent. A rhythm develops. What feels like a free-for-all becomes something akin to music. Solos, followed by the ensemble playing together, until it’s time for another solo.

Think of every conversation you’ve had in a bar with one friend, and what happens when a third friend joins. You move from the bar to a table so you can face each other, right? And without malice you begin cutting one another off, disagreeing, modifying, one-upping, all the while forcing yourself and your friends to make their stories sharper, funnier, sadder, better.

I am now noticing the Rules of Thirds everywhere. A friend, for instance, recommended a podcast, Unwritten, in which two former baseball players, Ron Darling and Jimmy Rollins, talk about such “unwritten” rules of baseball as who sits where on the team bus and how to talk to managers. Their exchanges are interesting, especially for a fan like me. But when another major leaguer joins in, the conversation takes off. 

They trade stories. No, that is not quite right. They begin telling stories that you suspect they’ve told many times before – I know this to be true, having interviewed a lot of baseball players; they have their stories – except now they’re telling them to each other and, ballplayers being the competitive souls they are, start to compete. 

They are telling stories to an audience with skin in the game; soon enough your turn will come and you’d best be ready with your “A” material. As athletes, they were taught that the best way for young players to improve is to face ever stronger competition. 

Perhaps the same is true for writers.

My late colleague, Dick Wald, told me a story of his early days in the post-war years at the New York Herald Tribune: how exciting it was as a cub reporter to finally be invited along by the older guys – alas, almost always men in those Paleozoic times – to drink after work. 

Dick quickly learned that he’d best keep his mouth shut if he ever wanted to be invited back. So he sat back and just listened and as he did, got an education on how to tell stories that people wanted to hear.

Bear in mind that this was an era when many journalists had not gone to graduate school, let alone college, or for that matter even finished high school. But they could tell a story. They had to. If they couldn’t, someone else would be ready to elbow them off the stage.

Writers are encouraged to read, and reading does offer endless, invaluable lessons. But reading, like writing, is a solo act which means the lessons are top down. Perhaps there is a case to be made to add listening to every writer’s education – but listening of a particular sort: listening to people tell stories so that when your turn comes you’ve learned enough about what works and what does not.

Do not think of the Rule of Thirds as a crucible, a test, a rite of passage. Think of it as a game because the operative word in game is play. The idea is to have fun, even if the occasional elbow gets thrown and feelings get bruised.

You want to win? Listen. 

* * *

I’ve been writing a lot about my students’ stories – how they spent months reporting on the frozen moments of the photographs they’ve found. 

Their stories have now been published as a book – Exhumed: Experiments in Memory, Issue #9 of the Delacorte Review. 

It is a terrific collection and I hope you buy it because in addition to being a wonderful read, all royalties are shared by the students.

Thanks and enjoy.