Showing posts with label MICE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MICE. Show all posts

Friday, July 23, 2021

MICE Preference

Greetings from the Hemingway House garden in Key West, FL. No mice here. Too many polydactyl cats on the property. They have the run of the place. They are pampered and well cared for and they own the place. 

Like everyone else this week, the MICE tool is new to me. The concepts aren't, but I had never heard of them brought together this way. Still, who doesn't like a good acronym?  

I love a good milieu. See photo at left. So. Milieu, Idea/Inquiry, Character, and Event. Those are my options.

Okay. Pre-existing conditions: we know Marcella is a character-driven writer versus being a plot-driven writer. This means that no matter what other MICE element I might use to frame a story, character is always, always a part of the picture in that frame. 

My first book opens with Ari being someplace she doesn't to be in a context she doesn't want and an EVENT kicks off her story. 

For book two, EVENT again. Someone Damen Sindrivik cares about becomes a target. Cue mayhem.

Book three mirrors the first book. Edie is someplace she doesn't much want to be in circumstances she doesn't want. Then someone drops a burning spaceship on her head and things get worse. So again. EVENT. 

Book four - - someone help. I seem to be stuck in a rut. The heroine is a prisoner sentenced to die in a war on a miserable planet in the middle of nowhere. And EVENT. Huh.

The Urban Fantasies start with character and a bit of milieu ,but then, that's the genre, isn't it? This makes me wonder if your MICE choices might be partially dictated by genre expectations. Idea/inquiry is going to show up reliably in mystery and thriller. UF really wants to linger in setting. Space opera requires a steep on ramp to an inciting incident - the event. Women's fiction usually lasers in on character. I feel like I rarely see a single element used from the MICE toolkit. It's usually a combination of two. I'm trying to think if I've ever seen a story that used more than that, though. I'm coming up empty. Can you think of someone who's used more than two tools at a time? Bonus points if they do it really well. 





Thursday, July 22, 2021

Writing with the MICE quotient

a triangle piece of red watermelon with black seeds sitting on a light colored wood cutting board

This picture of a triangle piece of watermelon is the closest thing I have to fitting this topic...at least it's a triangle? Maybe that's an idication to my contribution to this week which is:

MICE!


Milieu

Idea

Character

Event


Jeffe did her homework and explained the MICE quotient, check it out and her links to The Writing Excuses Podcast! 


For me, I don’t consider myself a technical writer and couldn’t have told you the four elements that start a story before Sunday. I just write. I see a story in my head and I put the words down.


And if you’re curious, after reading the four options I can say I start my stories with Event—nested in character. When I write fantasy or science fiction the stories start out with something big that changes the status quo and the endings are a resolution to the new normal. 


There really can’t be a return to the old normal. Characters progress and change and when that happens normal is altered. 


I wish I had more to offer on the topic, but I'll bow out and leave a giant arrow back to Jeffe and KAK's posts. 


What element do you use in your writing? 

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Using the MICE Tool to Find Where the Story Begins


This week at the SFF Seven, we're asking each other which MICE quotient we usually start with in a story. I can see that the calendar queen, KAK, is anticipating my bitching about not knowing what these things are, because she helpfully provided a definition and some useful links. 

It turns out that the MICE quotient is a tool originated by Orson Scott Card (brilliant storyteller, awful human being) for categorizing story elements. MICE stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event. The Writing Excuses Podcast explores the MICE technique frequently, so I was able to listen to a couple of episodes to learn about it. Here's a list of the episodes where they mention it. This episode is particularly useful, from back in 2011, as Mary Robinette Kowal explains how MICE works. The podcasters also amusingly mull that "milieu" is really setting, but that SICE isn't nearly as good of an acronym. This episode is also useful for the discussion of the MICE approach to conflict.

To summarize this approach to writing - part of my job as the one who kicks off the topic for the week - I'm borrowing heavily from the Writing Excuses episodes I cited. 

Basically these four elements can be emphasized or de-emphasized in telling a story. Short stories tend to focus on one of these elements, while longer works use several. Novels typically have all four, often in a nested approach. The tool essentially dictates how a story begins and ends. 

So, for Milieu, a story begins with the protagonists exiting or entering a space, and ends with them returning to the space. For example, The Hobbit begins with leaving The Shire and ends with returning to it. 

For Idea, or Inquiry, the story begins with a question, like in a murder murder mystery, where the question is posed of why a person is dead and who killed them. It ends with the answer.

With Character, the story begins with a protagonist who is unhappy or unfulfilled, and ends with them fulfilled--or resigned to being unfulfilled. Romance and Lit Fiction are two genres that use this tool a lot.

Finally, a story that uses Event begins with something happening that changes the status quo, and ends with either re-establishing the old normal or establishing a new normal. These kinds of stories focus on action and often disaster.

As I mentioned earlier, a novel will also use these tools in a nested fashion, which I find very interesting. Mary Robinette used the example of html code (also applicable to algebraic formulas), where you essentially close brackets in the same order that you open them.

Html coding looks like this: 

<p><b><i> “Dark Wizard is one of my top reads ever.” </i> ~ NY Times Bestselling Author Darynda Jones</b> </p>

The p opens the paragraph and /p ends it. Same with b for bolding, and i for italics, giving you this formatted result:

“Dark Wizard is one of my top reads ever.” ~ NY Times Bestselling Author Darynda Jones

So, in a novel, where you use all four elements, you'd back out the same way you entered. It might look like this:

<Character><Milieu><Inquiry><Event></Event></Inquiry></Milieu></Character>

To finally answer the question of what I start with? I'm an intuitive writer, so I don't plan these things, but it's interesting to note that I pretty much always start with character, followed closely by Milieu. The above pattern is how my book DARK WIZARD goes. The pattern also repeats within smaller sections and scenes throughout the book, but this is true of the overall pattern. Basically Character frames the overall arc, as does Milieu - then there's a lot of moving from Inquiries and Events - sometimes with smaller Milieu changes.

So, the story opens as such:

Gabriel Phel crested the last ridge of the notorious Knifeblade Mountains that guarded Elal lands on nearly three sides, and faced the final barrier. The path through the mountains had been narrow, crooked, with blind endings and unexpected pitfalls.

Not unlike his life, Gabriel thought with grimly sardonic humor. 

My wizard opens the story, moving into a new Milieu - physically and metaphorically. It's also worth noting here that Milieu also refers to the larger setting of being in an alternate fantasy world, which was something I wanted to be sure to telegraph from the beginning. Gabriel has a plan to change his life, but he soon encounters many questions when he meets the heroine, Nic. It's amusing to me how I introduce her in Chapter 2.

Skirts swirling about her ankles, Lady Veronica Elal paced restlessly to the heavy velvet curtains that covered the barred windows of her round tower room, and slipped behind them. Shivering in the chill trapped there, she hooked her fingers into the slats of the shutters anyway, ignoring the cold bite of the metal. It was a ridiculous habit she’d developed over the last months of seclusion, as if she could make the spaces between the rigid slats wider, so she could glimpse just a bit more of the outside world.

Character, then Milieu. Funny, huh?

I enjoyed learning about this tool and will give it thought for future books. I can see how it would be useful for deciding where to begin a story - and for structuring a satisfying ending.