How Long Should Your Story Be, and Who's Your Audience?
Playwright Kyle Bass considers the Armenian 3-Apple story rule
In traditional Armenian storytelling a tale always begins with, “There was and there was not”: There was and there was not a king who had three sons. And here’s the coda that traditionally brings every Armenian tale to its end: “Three apples fell from heaven: one for the teller of this tale, one for the listener, and one for the person who heeds the teller’s words.”
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Once Upon Three Apples, or Notes on How to Measure a Story*
by Kyle Bass
The words “perfection” and “perfect” come to us from the Latin perficio, “to finish” or “to bring to an end.”
Once upon a time, I adapted a novel into screenplay form. Because the book tells its tale in a compact 132 pages, the publisher called it “a novella.” I wince a bit at literary labels that want to define a work by its length. Isn’t a short story simply a story? We don’t call a novel “a long story.”
Playwrights, too, are fond of naming their literary children for their size—one-act, full-length, ten-minute play. I understand the distinctions, but a play is a play is a play. Content and form, size and scope, think of it how you will. Shakespeare’s Hamlet could not have been told in ten pages (though, for kicks and giggles, writer-tricksters have successfully reduced Hamlet to just that length), and the best of so-called “ten-minute” plays would lose their delicate theatrical power if they were even one page, one minute longer.
If you dared to ask Edward Albee what the new play he was writing was about, he would say, “It’s about 90 minutes.” While his prickly pithiness was a means by which to protect the sanctity of his process, Albee’s stiletto at-the-ready reply cuts to an important truth about art and dimension: a short painting; a full-length poem? Of course not. A thing is complete in its own completeness.
Still, while the literary lore of the six-word tale (misattributed to Hemingway) —“For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”—persists, narratives, as we have understood and crafted them since what?—Gilgamesh?—tend to adhere to certain principles of form and, yes, length in order to fulfill reader and audience expectation. And 16 or 18 syllables does not a haiku make. But exactly how many words must come between “Once upon a time,” and “happily ever after” before we can kiss the baby good night?
In traditional Armenian storytelling a tale always begins with “There was and there was not”: There was and there was not a king who had three sons. And here’s the coda that traditionally brings an Armenian tale to its end: “Three apples fell from heaven: one for the teller of this tale, one for the listener, and one for the person who took it to heart.”
After writing and revising for what can seem like a thousand years, a writer dares to say to themself, “I think it’s done.” Their certain uncertainty—I have and I have not written a book, as the Armenian storyteller might have it—acknowledges the unknowable force, the magic that is both in and out of the writer’s hands, which brings a work to its sudden completeness.
As a character says with wonder at the very end of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, “Isn’t it amazing how the play fit exactly between the time that the lights came up and the lights went down?”
Perfect.
Kyle Bass is a playwright, screenwriter and librettist whose work spans theatre, opera and film. His plays include The Floydians (Keen Company, Off-Broadway; published by Samuel French/Concord Theatricals ), Toliver & Wakeman (Franklin Stage Company, Colgate University Theater), Tender Rain and Salt City Blues (Syracuse Stage), Possessing Harriet (Syracuse Stage, Franklin Stage Company, East Lynne Theater Company, HartBeat Ensemble; published by Theatrical Rights Worldwide), and Citizen James, or The Young Man Without a Country (Syracuse Stage, HartBeat Ensemble, national tour). His new plays include The Civilities, commissioned by Franklin Stage Company and premiering there this August, and The Black Nationals, commissioned by Syracuse Stage and set to premiere there in 2027. In collaboration with National Medal of Arts recipient Ping Chong, Kyle co-authored Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo (Syracuse Stage, La MaMa). Under commission of the Washington National Opera, Recently, Kyle adapted the libretto for a new production of Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha which premiered earlier this year. Kyle is Resident Playwright at Syracuse Stage and Associate Professor of Theater at Colgate University, where he teaches playwriting, screenwriting, and contemporary African American dramatic literatures, among other courses. More at kylebassplaywright.com
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