The Rule of One

“Not a wasted word. This has been a main point to my literary thinking all my life.” — Hunter S. Thompson

I was reminded yesterday of an editor I served under a decade or so ago, we'll call him Adam, who remains my image of what a writing, journalism and storytelling coach should be. Always patient, soft spoken and thoughtful, Adam was — and remains, I assume — one of the best writers I ever met.

At the time, I was struggling with a complexity issue. I was using words and clauses like they were parts of an erector set, screwing one on to the next until the whole badly engineered thing came
crashing down.
Adam made me live by the Rule of One.

One Idea Per Sentence — One Sentence Per Graph

Take, for example, the following graph:

Johnny McDanielson, the area’s only Irish-American head high school soccer coach, has a hefty 17 students on his varsity team and another 16 playing junior varsity at Mount Hollyhock High. But even with eight out of 17 Irish-American varsity players and 15 out of 16 playing junior varsity, McDanielson said, of soccer, “It’s a dying sport, especially in the Irish community.”

Adam would have made me change that to:

Johnny McDanielson is the area’s only Irish-American head high school soccer coach.
He has 17 students on his varsity soccer team and another 16 playing junior varsity at Mount Hollyhock High.
Of the 17 kids playing varsity, eight are Irish-American, plus 15 out of the 16 junior varsity players.
Nonetheless, McDanielson said, “It’s a dying sport, especially in the Irish community.”

It doesn't make for exciting copy, but it's clean and readable. Please note, I am not suggesting that every story should be written in this way but if, like me, you have a tendency to bolt one clause or phrase onto the next, this is a good, basic structure that keeps your writing honest, as it were.

So I guess it's not a rule, but rather a "Guideline of One."

Adam believed that brevity is the soul of wit (I ask then, what are boxers the soul of, but I digress) and we would sometimes play games to keep our work punchy and short. For example, we would write calendar items in Haiku form, like:

Battle of the Bands
6:30 p.m., high school
August Seventeenth