MICE Quotient - Part Two "Inquiring Minds want to Know"

 As mentioned in the prior edition of this creative blog, MICE is an acronym for a creative process/tool first proposed by Orson Scott Card that has been propagated and endorsed by Mary Robinette Kowal. The tool breaks down storytelling into four categories of content within your tale. Milieu or Environment, Inquiry or Investigation, Character (That one needs no alternative answer) and Event or Occurrence.

The MICE theory actually has a specific mathematical formula which you can research on your own because I don't tend to get that precise when I am creating. It will even tell you how many words you should spend on each element. I use MICE sort of like the Pirate Code, "they're more like guidelines" to keep me on the right track. In this blog we will talk about the I portion of MICE: Inquiry.

We have all experienced an Inquiry based story. Fans of Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, Monk, Hercule Poirot, or Miss Marple or as far back as Sherlock Holmes know the formula for an investigation. An investigation is exactly what we are talking about with an Inquiry as the dominant theme or component of your story. However, as with Milieu, an inquiry story often has several other layers that may also be MICE components. 

I go back to Aliens, in this case; It falls into the inquiry category as well as it does Milieu since the goal of the expedition is to figure out what happened. Star Trek: TOS is an inquiry story at its very core 'To boldly go where no man has gone before". Even Scooby Doo's various adventures are Inquiry stories as they root out and unmask the villainous "old man Jenkins" each time. Anytime you have a mystery or when characters are trying to figure something out in your story, you have included an Inquiry component. 

Mystery or Who-Dunit stories tend to take the lead here because that is the whole point of the tale. The reader has a surrogate that is in the story, that could be Encyclopedia Brown, or Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple or Monk. The surrogate is the gateway for the reader into the story and the details of the case are revealed through their dogged pursuit of clues. They chase down leads with the assistance of various side characters or love interests and uncover red herrings. The "red herring" is of course a staple of the genre. It is, in the simplest terms, a distraction. The red herring leads the characters down the wrong path. Sometimes it leads to danger and others just to frustration. It could be an attempt for the real criminal to frame another character or it could just be a mistake or a flawed leap in logic the investigator makes. In either case, it gives the illusion that the "bad guy" will get away with it. It is an illusion because the genre requires that the investigator eventually "get their man".

That is a tried and true formula for a mystery or crime novel. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys did it through hundreds of adventures, Sue Grafton has nearly a full alphabet full of mysteries. How is that possible? How can something that is so formulaic have new life over and over in story after story? The answer is two fold. The first is the easiest answer. Readers find comfort in formulae. They know what they are getting into when they peruse the mystery aisle in the bookstore. When they use mystery as a search word on-line, the algorithm delivers exactly what they are expecting. So how can there still be bestselling mystery authors, when the same formula has been used for literally over a hundred years?

Why are there fifteen different police procedural dramas on television? The other stuff.

Monk is labelled the "defective detective" so there is a strong character element in those stories. The same with the peculiarities of Columbo or the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, but his stories also have the added benefit of Milieu since stories like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express also have locations/settings that add to the flavor of the story.

There are multiple NCIS or CSIs on TV because the crimes may be the same and the solving techniques similar, but the location and characters differ, sometimes significantly. Mikey Spillane's Mike Hammer is radically different than Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher. The hard boiled tough guy private eye versus the small town busybody. There is practically an infinite number of character types that can be used, reused, folded, spindled and reconstituted to breath new life into what would otherwise be a worn out retread genre. So if you are writing a mystery, remember that victims have been killed, kidnapped, burgled and terrorized in nearly everyway you can imagine already. Don't let that stop you from creating. Just find a way to make that mystery connect with your lead character(s) possibly in a personal way, set in an interesting or different environment populated with characters loaded with their own foibles and affectations. Who knows, it may be a hit.

More about character in the next blog as we move onto the C part of MICE