The MICE Quotient - Part One

 It's 5:15 in the morning and I can't sleep. It's not that I have a new story in my head that needs to be told. That does often happen at 5AM, but less so these days. My unrest is due to the realization that I am quite late in my most recent blog entry.

A few weeks ago, I embarked on this creative focused relaunch and so far all I have said is what not to do. While that may be instructive, it is looking back at mistakes rather than planning for what you want to create. So today it is time to talk about a concept coined by the famous Orson Scott Card and then championed by the author Mary Robinette Kowal called "The MICE Quotient". It is not about little furry animals that infest you house in the winter; MICE is an acronym for Milieu, Inquiry, Character and Event.

Each of these four items are ways you can approach a creative endeavor, mostly narrative fiction, or fiction that tells a story. I recently watched a lecture on MICE give by Mary Robinette Kowal on You Tube as a guest lecturer in Brandon Sanderson's class on Sci-Fi and Fantasy writing and although I feel this approach is overly structured it lends some needed definition to what we sometimes scattered creatives are trying to accomplish. There are lots of other references to this process on-line and certainly feel free to dive into the rabbit hole and see where it takes you. For my ends, I intend to use MICE in the early planning stages on my next few stories to determine the core components of the tale.

First we will talk about Milieu. I do no intend to tell strictly a milieu tale. In my opinion, stories that make the milieu or environment the main focus are boring. The first ten pages on the novelization of Star Wars is a great example. I swear that at least half of the first chapter is spent describing the sand and overall environmental conditions of Tatooine. Then you finally learn about the protagonist and what causes him to leave the farm and become a jedi. This is an example of milieu overload at the start of a story and it is easy to fall into this trap. You spent all this time world building, you want to show it off. It is possible to have too much of a good thing though. You certainly want to highlight the parts of your creation that differ from the common accepted norms or short hand of the genre, but be wary of spending to much time on it. If the environment is unique enough to be a character in the story you need it to be cool. Dune is an example of this. The necessity of spice to all aspects of life, be they the religion of the Fremem, or the pursuit of intergalactic trade or warfare since it is essential for stellar navigation the environment becomes an element almost as important as the characters.

In my Hidden World stories, the environment is important, but I also rely heavily on the short hand conventions of fantasy stories and world building done by others before me. I use Elves that are mostly Tolkienish, their is a kingdom run by a cruel tyrant and there is magic that can be wielded by many people but it requires study or a fundamental or inborn understanding. I describe where my world departs from the accepted fantasy norms, but do not dwell too much. I prefer to spend more time on the characters. But I will get to that some other time.

So in summary, the M in MICE is about your environment and what makes it so special. In order to truly be a milieu focused story, it needs to be special. Your story will be focused on getting to understand and explore your world so there needs to be cool stuff in it to find. It is very rare to find a strictly milieu story, often they are spiced up by adding other MICE components. Aliens for example is a mixture of milieu, inquiry and character. The ship is a neat environment and its claustrophobic feel and the conventions of this mercenary unit make it interesting, but it becomes more interesting once you add the inquiry into "what happened" to the prior crew. It become even more interesting when you add fascinating characters that grow and change throughout the process. 

Next time, more on Inquiry and how that can function in the story in a compelling way as we look at mysteries or detective stories that tend to have a heavy inquiry focus. Until then, get back to creating.