Here’s an interesting aside that came from talk of Reality TV where songs are repeated more than three times…
When I was writing out Hatch to put on my website, I was basically cutting up one linear story into lots of short stories that can either stand alone or function to create a whole story when taken together.
The key is that they can be read in any order, so you might get the metaphorical storytelling device of seeing the murder and then finding out whodunit, or you might get the device of knowing whodunit and then spending the rest of the story finding out why.
As I was going through, I instinctively went to make sure that I’d done the rule of three for a few important plots points, until it occurred to me that you cannot have a rule of three when you have no idea which stories will be read in which order.
There’s no way to guarantee that the audience member will see it once, see it twice so the repetition makes them remember, and then see it a third time so you can mess with their expectations, or deliver a punchline.
They might just get the punchline. They might just get one, and then the punchline. So I had to put the relevant action into as many of the short stories as I could, in the hope that it would hit the audience at least one time more than the punchline, in whatever order.
Life isn’t linear. Storytelling is changing.
