The Other Rule of Three

and why the first is so often not the worst, but certainly the least best

Last night, in a Blue Pencil tutorial on Casting Your Characters, I was remembering a Royal Society of Literature writing workshop taught by Ali Smith. At one point, between exercises, she asked us to jot down three objects and set the paper aside. Later, she set us to write a story using one of the objects as a prompt. ‘The first one will be the easiest to work with,’ she said - and I knew she was right: even as I’d written down row of small, carved Indian elephants with jewelled eyes, my mind had begun unrolling the basics of that story.