The "Unicorn In The Garden" Rule

This is a rule guiding the creation of stories and plots, and is intimately connected to the principle of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

The rule is, quite simply:

If it's required by your plot, make one fantastic assumption in your story and only one - and do it in or before the first chapter (or first page or two, for shorter works). Do not add more as the story goes on. And once you have your one assumption, all further fantastic elements must derive from it, not any new assumptions. And just to be fair, it must be either obvious to the reader, or something that can be deduced from evidence present in your story.

(And yes, having the whole point of a story being the process by which the reader finds or figures out the divergence which changed the entire landscape is perfectly valid, although if badly handled it can become little more than a Tomato Surprise.)

The name comes from the example of James Thurber's classic short story "The Unicorn In The Garden". Put simply, Thurber's story is about an ordinary suburban couple who wake up one morning to find that there is a unicorn in their garden. The story works because the only fantastic element is the unicorn. If on the second page a flying saucer had landed in the garden next to the unicorn, it would not have been as strong or as good a story.

This cannot be emphasized strongly enough to the writer, beginning or experienced: One and only one "unicorn" should be in play in a story. If you have two or more, you have a case where you need to find a more general "fantastic assumption" that allows for all - or you have several different stories demanding to be written and colliding inside your head.

Meta Origin is a typical mechanism for "cheating around" this principle by transforming multiple elements into subsets of one. Sometimes it works, sometimes doesn't.

Even when taking this too literally may be not feasible, the principle still stands: multiple elements should form one system that makes some sense as a whole on a given scope, and the first element should be both meaningful (if not necessarily most important) for the system and linked to the next few. And the connection itself, whatever transpires to show it, in turn should tell something about plot, characters and/or setting. This road is navigable, even though it adds new hidden pitfalls - the shorter all connections are, the less.

• Elements known primarily as parts of one mythos: when one of the four Alchemic Elementals is introduced, the readers will expect three others to be at least mentioned and may even be puzzled if the author misses an opportunity to do so.

These can be considered components of a single bigger element, with further changes to it being counted as new elements.

• Elements from closely related mythos: you may have an unicorn on the first page, and a dragon on the second - but why are they there together? There must be a strong connection between them, be it a fight to the death, posturing for the sake of appearances in the stalemate of an ancient conflict, one of them trying to save another, or simply a discussion of bloodlines that have the two in heraldry (to one - or better both - of which an already-introduced character is related, of course) - because if they don't, this will feel like a weird fantasy zoo. And even then you would do well to let your unicorn walk through a few pages before meeting the dragon.

May need the connections to be reinforced until it looks almost like the first case.

• • One of the common modern variations on this level is "vampires and werewolves": while they don't appear together in the classics, and often even seem to be conflicting re-interpretation of the same early stories, they share "gothic", "masquerade" and "transformation" properties. When vampires and werewolves appear together, they usually have a strong relationship, be it conflict, servitude, or comraderie in face of the monster hunters. Often they are given a Meta Origin.
• Elements that are not already established as linked in any way: if you've got a unicorn on the first page and land a flying saucer on the second, the reader will expect that the premise is either Monsters vs. Aliens or "unicorns were pets of Ancient Astronauts!".

If the integration is done right, the story doesn't fail, but the first solution here may be seen as inherently goofy, and for the second you need to prevent Bait and Switch, otherwise the readers who wanted saucers may have already closed this story, and the readers who want unicorns may be put off by this little twist. Both problems are sadly typical.

• • Dragonriders of Pern has this - on the Myth Arc level, with foreshadowing constantly paving the road, and in part via Meta Origin-ation. So yes, "dragons... and spaceships" turn can be done, but the turning radius ends up closer to "interstellar" than to "around the wingtip".

Note how moving the elements of premise apart toward a less-related mythos obviously makes it fail easier and harder, and adds challenges for actually pulling it off well.

The rule and its name come from a set of writer's guidelines written by the late George Scithers during his tenure as the first editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine between 1977 and 1982.

Examples of The "Unicorn In The Garden" Rule include:

Why (and when) it's a good idea

It's a subset of a general rule that if too many elements are intoduced at once, the reader will be dazzled or disoriented as to which is where. Unrelated elements tend to form a pile in mythological / fantasy / sci-fi / conspiracy / all-of-the-above kitchen sink. Should the reader need to dig through this all? Will the reader bother to do it? While the gag-a-day format seems to allow more elements, it usually also strongly separates these, so there's only one per episode. This principle dovetails into Like Reality Unless Noted, because the author has to figure out and describe differences from the "base setting", which usually is supposed to be our world. Also, this dovetails into The Law of Conservation of Detail. The introduced elements need some common framework and a way to resolve inevitable issues when they run into each other. Multiple independent authors can make it worse. The settings where All Myths Are True or All Theories Are True usually end up with either a Meta Origin or no continuity to speak of.

• Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, not even the big kitchen sink of kitchen sinks can afford to ignore this principle altogether.
  • Planescape was made as one rubust cosmology running on a few simple and flexible principles, which emerged from the need for the existing weakly-related elements to make some sense and was best defined in a separate AD&D2 setting. Sure, there's infinite customization that allowed to incorporate everything else - but under this, it has a very few basic principles, which is why it worked well enough.

D&D3 seems to be built via introducing the new designers and showing them older edition without explaining why this or that was ditched. So it began to lose this skeleton and slide into a "yes, but no, but yes" swamp - and soon there was no articulate cosmology at all.

By the time of D&D4, cosmology turned out to be just like the rest of it: a mix of obviously unrelated elements that worked better before they were welded together and seemed either incomprehensible or ludicrous for the fans of earlier editions.

• • Forgotten Realms has the Weave as the unified power source of all magic.

Since it was already established that the Weave is damaged, the Shadow Weave was introduced later as the surviving broken-off (and hijacked) fragment. This massively Retcons the relative importance of many matters, of course. And introduces confusion. But at least it makes sense.

Then along came the Demonweave, an attempt to plug yet another copycat into the same outlet, based on a pun (Lolth is a part-spider, and spiders spin webs. Or... weave them. Get it?) and no preexisting in-universe justification. If the fan site is any indication, this one fell quite flat.

• Gunnerkrigg Court began with the protagonist as a kid collecting oddities, proceeded to investigate those oddities and... glimpse by glimpse draws a solid looking whole built around one element: the Spirit World. Almost everything else uses it, comes from it or feeds it, so the new elements are but variations of the existing ones. The only element that seems to not fit in is treated as shocking or entertaining enigma in-universe. Beyond that, it's pretty much "All Myths Are True" by design, but what of it?

Why (and when) it's a bad idea

The single introduced element may bloat out of proportion. And sometimes its exclusivity simply doesn't make sense. That's because the underlying principle is that the whole setting should be healthy as a system. The single element is easier to integrate into "Like Reality Unless Noted", but easier runs it over, too.

• Early "single gimmick" sci-fi had neither writers nor readers well used to introduction of elements that weren't previously established. So it ran on this principle, and thus demonstrates how it can be justified - and how clumsily it can be misused. This led to ridiculous results, such as sudden out-of-character Expospeak.
• Anything "futuristic" built this way. Just imagine "science fiction" of 2000-something year written in 1900-something that would extrapolate photography and telephones into videotelephones... but added nothing else, not even TV, and still runs on fire-belching steam automobiles. That's how all "one gimmick" worlds look like: bizarre and ludicrous. As if while the people who made jetpacks worked, everyone else stood around looking at them and did nothing on their own.

Stories That Ignore The Rule To Their Detriment

• Revenge by Jared "Skysaber" Ornstead. This story starts with the "fantastic assumption" that a Ranma ½ character - in this case Shampoo - can learn from her mistakes and formulate a plan making use of her canon resources which actually succeeds. It's a great idea, well executed, and carries the story along nicely for several chapters, until suddenly the reader is handed a new "fantastic assumption": that Nabiki has been so focused on enriching herself with petty con games, blackmail and betting pools for the last few years, she has completely missed a few details about her own home and family - like Kasumi being an Olympic figure-skating champion; that their mother is only divorced from their father, not dead; and that she has half-siblings she never knew about because she was too distracted by her schemes. Now either of these concepts would make a good story by themselves, but when they both appear in the same story, they compete with each other and eventually derail the whole plot - literally, as Shampoo's Revenge has been a Dead Fic since 2007.