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Every great writer in history has had their rules they like to follow. Edgar Allen Poe's main rule was that a short story needed to have one mood and everything needed to push towards that one mood. Hemingway's main rule, I believe, was that he needed to get drunk first and that the rest would take care of itself.
One of the most maligned rules of writing fiction is this idea that you can only have one thing – one single thing – that was changed about your fictitious world if you want to tell a good story.
You'll see both sides of this (admittedly silly) debate. Some people swear by this rule, whereas some people find it restrictive and boring.
And, since I'm a genius and clearly know what I'm talking about, I am going to tell you who exactly is right. Ready?
Nobody.
Nobody is right about the one thing rule.
This concept of "one thing" actually comes from my favorite author, the American horror master H.P. Lovecraft. In one of his many essays on writing fiction, Lovecraft laid out a simple rule that he believed was necessary for creating effective fiction.
One cannot, except in immature pulp charlatan–fiction, present an account of impossible, improbable, or inconceivable phenomena as a commonplace narrative of objective acts and conventional emotions. Inconceivable events and conditions have a special handicap to overcome, and this can be accomplished only through the maintenance of a careful realism in every phase of the story except that touching on the one given marvel. - H.P. Lovecraft, "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction"
Doesn't this guy's face just scream "Life of the Party?"
In truth, this rule has two parts: The outlandish cannot be presented as mundane, or else it will be perceived as mundane, and there can be but one outlandish event or figure in an otherwise untouched reality.
If you squint, and maybe put your hand over a few words here and there, you can see where people get this idea of "one thing," right? But most people's concept of the "one thing" is incomplete.
Lovecraft wasn't saying that all fiction, in order to be good, needs to have just one strange happening and the rest must be reality. That isn't it at all. If that were the case, then Lovecraft was offhandedly dismissing a large swath of the greatest literature mankind has ever produced with very little concern.
What Lovecraft is specifically referring to here is the effectiveness of Weird Fiction, his chosen genre. It's in the title, after all: "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction."
And look. If you're really wanting to model Lovecraft's notions of Weird Fiction, you absolutely do need to keep this rule in mind. Weird Fiction is all about the effect, similar to Poe's aforementioned rule, and how it shakes the core of a sane mind with strange and wonderful possibilities.
Another of Lovecraft's great quotes is:
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. - H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"
The essay this quote comes from is a masterwork in horror fiction and does a great service to anyone who wonders where brilliant, nonsensical ideas of the strange might come from. Lovecraft was a pure academic when it came to studying horror literature, but he also happened to have a knack for producing truly chilling tales himself.
Lovecraft's entire goal was to make his readers feel small and insignificant and afraid because of the vastness and mystery of the universe. And for that to work, he had to make his "one thing" as big and as important as possible, something he couldn't do if he diluted it with too many fantastic images at one time.
Admittedly, I tried to follow this rule in my collection The Call of the Mountains: And Other Tales of the Bizarre, (shameless plug) and I think it worked well. If there's only one horrific thing for the reader to see, two things happen. First, the reader is focusing on the outlandishness and the horror of that one thing. Second, it is easier, then, for the reader to see that thing in their own world.
Sure, your world isn't made up of dragons and trolls and warlocks sipping chamomile tea, but you could maybe convince somebody that one of those things is true if it has been hiding all this time and they just never saw it.
So the rule of having one thing isn't universal, and it was never intended to be universal. It was always meant for a very specific set of circumstances and a very specific genre.
But..and Sir Mix-a-Lot would love this next part, because it is a huge but...that also doesn't mean the rule of one thing is only useful for Weird Fiction.
There are plenty of books and genres out there that really want to effectively move the reader with some kind of awe and wonder. Not all of it is fear or dread like with Lovecraft. Sometimes it can be joy, it can be a sense of majesty, it can be a sense of euphoria.
One of the best contemporary examples of the "one thing" rule, in my opinion, is the Harry Potter series. I know what you're thinking, "But Harry Potter had all sorts of stuff going on. There was magic, and there was a boarding school for witches, and there were trolls and evil werewolves and ghosts..." and ad nauseam. Yes. Harry Potter had a lot of mystical, magical people in it.
But it was still effective because, in the simplest sense, the magical world was the one thing that was new to Harry Potter. He didn't grow up in the wizarding world, he came into it late. So it stood in stark contrast to the "real world" that both him and the reader knew. Since Harry was the audience's window into this world, we got to see it as strange and wonderful because it was strange and wonderful to him; it wasn't mundane.
And think about how many people have lived as if Hogwarts was just behind a magical veil they wish to see through ever since the first book and first movie came out. It clearly is an effective narrative and an effective tool.
You could even turn this rule around on The Lord of the Rings series, a series that features every manner of magical being that has ever been conceived. The narrative follows Frodo, a somewhat normal little fellow who lives in a quiet village. Sure, he's a hobbit. Sure, one of his best friends is a messianic wizard. But most of this wonderful world is new to him, and that lets us follow along with a similar sense of wonder. Not to mention that the One Ring is his one thing, it's the impetus that changes the otherwise somewhat recognizable world around him.
Being that effective with hard fantasy or hard sci-fi is difficult, but not impossible.
And you won't get that effectiveness by piling more and more lore onto a story. As they said in the very strange Broadway musical Urinetown, the best way to kill a story is too much exposition. The word could literally be restated as "out of position," and that's what happens to you when you're confronted with too much exposition: You're pulled out of position. The second-best way to kill a story is too much meaningless lore.
In most sci-fi or fantasy, especially with amateur writers, that lore often comes out as heavy-handed exposition, so it's a two-for-one deal of disaster. Blue light special!
Whenever you tell a friend you're a writer, or want to be a writer, they always follow it up by telling you about this other friend who is a writer. And then that friend asks you to read their other friend's story. And more often than not, that story is some kind of epic sci-fi fantasy because everyone under 25 thinks they want to write about elves and aliens.
I realize I'm about to sound like a jerk here, but let's hold our noses and dive in. I hate reading that stuff for the simple reason that it always makes the same mistakes. When somebody has crafted this beautiful, detailed fantasy world, they think the first three chapters need to be a history book.
(I also realize that I'm a huge hypocrite because I've asked people to read my unfinished works before and they've always been so generous to do so. Sorry, folks, but I can have my bitter, curmudgeonly moments.)
These same people have probably never read the history books their teachers gave them in high school because history books are boring.
It isn't just amateurs who do this, either. When I was reading Dragonflight, the first book in Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, I almost stopped immediately when I read that Pern was in space in the future and that people from Earth moved there and started breeding lizards into fire-breathing, dragon-like creatures.
Why couldn't they just be dragons on a planet called Pern? Why did it need to be in our outer space in our future?
I realize it sounds like I'm contradicting myself here, since earlier I said that Harry Potter was effective specifically because it was set in our world. But again, that was one thing. Magic was real and everything else branched off of that.
In the span of a few sentences, McCaffrey had asked the audience to absorb a lot of outlandish information. There was no build-up, something else that Lovecraft advocated for in his essay "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction," and there was no stand-in for the audience to make it all seem wonderful since the protagonist was a young girl who had been raised on stories of dragons and yearned to ride them.
I'm glad that I got past that and finished the book, because I did enjoy it, but that one moment nearly derailed the whole story for me.
And yet, right now I'm reading Dune, the classic by Frank Herbert. Dune asks the reader to absorb a lot of information and alien culture and heavy sci-fi elements, but they aren't presented as exposition. Herbert jumps into the story and lets the history come out slowly.
And there's a moment in the first couple chapters that references how this alien society branched off of a history on Earth. There are clearly elements of our present society at work in Dune, but it works.
If you want to take a guess at what narrative is going to be effective, if you want to take a guess at what narrative is going to really move people on a wide spectrum, then the best place to start is by looking for stories that, in one way or another, follow Lovecraft's rule of having one thing.
Somehow, Lovecraft cracked something when he wrote down that rule. He figured out a way to toy with people's fears and perceptions. Even if writers today are none too happy about it, because they feel stuck following a rule they don't really understand or appreciate, you can't deny that Lovecraft plucks the audiences nerves like guitar strings because he's read the sheet music.
He knew that if you really want to disturb an audience, you've got to keep the focus on one thing.
Or don't. Whatever. Rules are stupid.