The Three Unities—A Key to a Seamless Journey

In my last newsletter, I talked about using white space to make a transition to a new place or a new time. This newsletter turns the concept on its head because I want to talk about tools that avoid unnecessary transitions. If we use the analogy of the accordion, it’s best to use long contractions sparingly and keep many contractions short, so the melody is easy to grasp. The tools that I’ve found most helpful in creating this seamlessness are called “the three unities”.

 Aristotle was the first thinker to introduce the concept of unity in relation to theater and Greek tragedies. (If we are thinking about “the whole story”, Aristotle was thinking about “the whole play”.) In the Poetics, he proposed that for a play to have unity, it had to have the following three unities:

1. Unity of place: All action happens in the same setting.

2. Unity of time: All action happens in a continuous time.

3. Unity of action: The narrative unfolds in a continuous thread. (No flashbacks or expositions.)

At first glance, the three unities may seem dry, obvious, even a road to undynamic writing. After all, Aristotle was discussing Greek tragedy—and thought the unity of time should cover 24 hours! But hang on: These strict rules don’t apply to modern writing. The challenge for a writer of 21st century fiction isn’t whether to break unity but when.

Being aware of the three unities is an excellent editing tool. Most first drafts have lines and passages you have to cut. But you’ll save yourself time by being aware of unnecessary breaks. Eventually, as you write, understanding unity becomes an instinctive part of your process and you’ll break it less often.

Unnecessary breaks in unity involve skipping to a different time or different place, or using a flashback. If these shifts are arbitrary, it’s clear that they interrupt the flow of a story for the reader. But what’s less clear is that they interrupt the creative flow for the writer

In my work with students –and in my own work—I often find that breaking unity is an automatic reaction that writers have when a story comes to a standstill. Rather than living with silence or the frustration of hitting a wall, it’s reassuring to write something. And nothing seems simpler than changing the time, the place, or including a flashback that will “explain” a character or the current situation.

            Here are a few examples of what writers do when they come to a standstill:

1.     Break unity of place:  

Characters who have been arguing in their kitchen, suddenly want to go out for coffee. But do they really want to go out for coffee? Usually, it’s the writer who wants to go out for coffee because she doesn’t know what comes next.

2.     Break unity of time:

The characters, previously about to weed their garden, are looking at the stars from the window of a strange house.  What happened to the weeding?  The writer came to an impasse and can’t wait for it to be night so she won’t have to work.

3.    Break unity of action:

A man in underground resistance is afraid he can’t do his job because he’s terrified of killing people. The writer worries that she hasn’t told enough about him. So she uses a flashback involving an abusive parent. The passage reads like a psychological footnote.

These breaks in unity are reassuring and convince the writer that the story is moving along. But they come from pressure rather than from discovery. The best solution is to take a break.. Go out for coffee. Wash the dishes. Take a walk.  When you come back to your work and nothing occurs to you, focus on something else.

A Couple of Exceptions:

1.   There are times when you suddenly want to write a passage that has nothing to do with the current scene. In this case, write it!  Breaking unity from inspiration almost always gives you material that you will be able to use at some point. Breaking unity because you’re anxious or feel stuck almost always interrupts the story.

2.   If you’re writing a wildly experimental narrative, you can break unity according to your own rules. This is because you have made a contract with the reader about the way you will handle space, time, and action.

                        Unity in Flash and Short Fiction

Here is a striking example of unity by Augusto Monterroso, who also wrote the story about the man and the dinosaur. It’s only 308 words, is told in the third person, and has unity of time, space, and action.

Eclipse

“When Brother Bartolome Arrazola knew he had lost his way, he conceded that nothing could save him. The powerful Guatemalan jungle had trapped him in a vise. Before his geographic ignorance he sat quietly waiting for death. He wanted to die there, hopelessly and alone, thinking about far-away Spain, particularly the convent in Los Abrojos where Charles the Fifth once lessened his influence by telling him that he trusted the religious fervor of his redemptive work.

After waking up, he found himself surrounded by a circle of indifferent natives who were getting ready to sacrifice him in front of the altar, an altar that Bartolome saw as the place where he would finally rest from his terrors, from his destiny, from himself.

Three years in this country had given him some knowledge of native dialects. He decided he would try something. He said a few words which the natives understood. He then had an idea he thought worthy of his talent, universal culture and prodigious knowledge of Aristotle. He remembered that a total eclipse of the sun was predicted for that day and in his most secret thoughts decided to use that knowledge to hoodwink his oppressors and save his life.

‘If you kill me, he said to them, I can blacken the sun in its heights.”

The natives looked at him fixedly and Bartolome caught disbelief in their eyes. A small counsel was set up and he waited confidently, not without contempt.

Two hours later Brother Bartolome Arrazola’s heart poured its fiery blood on the sacrificial stone (brilliant under the smoky light of an eclipsed sun), while one of the natives recited without inflection, unhurriedly, one by one, the endless dates in which there would be solar and lunar eclipses, that the astronomers of the Mayan community had predicted and written on their codices without Aristotle’s valuable help.

It’s important to understand the difference between a break in unity and a brief reference to another time or place. In Eclipse, Arrazola wants to die “thinking about far-away Spain, particularly the convent in Los Abrojos where Charles the Fifth once lessened his influence by telling him that he trusted the religious fervor of his redemptive work”.  This sentence gives us a lot of information about the main character, but it doesn’t leave the current situation and become a scene.  

In this 100-word flash piece by Elizabeth Zahn, the narrator never takes the reader out of the scene, although she does refer to her past. (This was published in The 100-Word Story, edited by Grant Faulkner and Lynn Mundell)

                                    A Blanket Decision

At the Twisted Stitchers meeting, I held up my first, nearly finished, crocheted baby blanket. They oohed and ahhed. “But look,” I said, “There’s a mistake 40 rows back. Should I frog it?” The thought of ripping out thousands of stitches, weeks of work, irked me. They smiled, shrugged, and crocheted. Finally, someone said, “It’s about what you can live with.” I hesitated. I had three ex-husbands, too many former jobs and careers to count, a slew of lost friendships, and closets full of bad purchases. I picked up the yarn and pulled. Finally, a mistake I could completely undo.

In “Thicker Than Water” (Also in The 100-Word Story), Jean Luc Bouchard explains briefly why the narrator had dinner with his grandfather, but leads seamlessly to the heart of the story.

      “I took my grandfather out to dinner for his birthday, because it seemed the proper thing to do. Neither of us particularly wanted to go to dinner together, but since he was alone and I happened to be visiting town during his birthday, I felt compelled to insist. My grandfather and I don’t have much in common; he’s a retired arms dealer, I am a circus clown. But after some torturous small talk concerning weather and health, as the meal began, we were finally able to come together as a family in the way we treated our waitress like a total shit.”

            And here’s another piece from the 100-Word Story that gives minimal information before the main event.

              My Future Depends on It by Miriam Ben-Yoseph

      I was 15 when we left Romania. It was 1965. Ceausescu just came to power. At the airport they searched our luggage and peered into our bodies. On the plane people shared their humiliating experiences with each other while dismantling their shoes and loosening their teeth to uncover hidden treasures. My mother and I rolled our eyes in utter disbelief just as we did down below when customs people were reaching inside our bodies. The man sitting next to my mother said: ‘I hope I do not have to go to the bathroom until Vienna. My future depends on it’”

Here are some things to try:

1.     Put two characters in a room or an outdoor setting and have them argue about something trivial and perhaps absurd: For instance: Whether to sell inherited china in a yard sale, put up a difficult relative in a hotel, hire a dog walker, or to stop eating wheat. Instead of forcing the characters to come to a decision, experiment with stopping if you feel unsure about what to write next. Leave the piece alone and come back to it later.

2.     Put two characters in a place that italicizes their tensions. For example: Put them in a mattress store, arguing about the best mattress to buy. (Their current mattress is unusable.) Or in a bakery, arguing about which pastries to buy for a brunch they’re giving. Again, instead of forcing the characters to come to a decision, experiment with stopping if you feel unsure about what to write next. Leave the piece alone and come back to it later.

3. Write a fairy tale that takes place in one place and one time with no flashbacks.

4. Most of us have manuscripts that we’ve abandoned. Find one, mull it over and see if you can find a place where you’ve truncated the narrative by breaking unity.

5.  Listen to music and be aware of themes and variations. Here’s one of my favorites. “Almost Blue” by David Friedman.

Remember to go back to “Making the Journal Dangerous”. Even if it’s not a daily habit, what you write often surprises you.