As I discussed in the introduction, Orson Scott Card is a terrible human being. He deserves the condemnation he’s got over the past twenty years. But he’s also the guy who wrote Ender’s Game, and, what is better, Pastwatch and “Unaccompanied Sonata.”
And he’s the guy who wrote How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy, which is still on my shelf.
I wouldn’t trust him with my teenage daughter, but I trust him to know how to write, and keep writing.
Example stories: Mazghunah, The City Sunk, The City Risen
Among many other interesting (and sometimes dated) advice, in How to…, Card talks about what he calls the MICE Quotient. MICE stands for
- Milieu
- Idea
- Character
- Event
This isn’t, like so many others, a way to figure out what story to tell (he has other chapters for that, as do we), but rather, to figure out how to tell it. And that is an altogether subtler magic.
Because so many ideas, so many stories, can be told as any of them, and it’s up to us as writers to pick the one that best suits the kind of story we want to tell, and how we want to tell it. Let me introduce them.
Milieu
A milieu is a place, a setting. The conventional structure for this is “story begins when protagonist comes to the place, ends when they leave (or decide to stay).” All portal fantasies (including Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Flash Gordon) are milieu stories. A whole lot of other stuff can happen while the protagonist is there (defeating a Wicked Witch and unmasking the Wizard, for example) but the promise the story makes at the beginning is that the end is when the protagonist either stays or goes.
Idea
An idea story starts with a question, and ends with an answer. Card cites a lot of Golden Age SF that basically romanticized the scientific method, I’ll go ahead and cite literally all mystery novels instead. No Time starts with the question, “who kills Gooch?” And although there’s a lot of fate vs. free will philosophy and a romance with his wife and a temptation with Maria, the story ends when Gooch gets his answer. Same with Sherlock. Same with that hot popular TV show about the detective/doctor/policeman confronted with a strange occurrence and tasked with figuring it out and solving the mystery.
Character
A character story, in Card’s view, is a story where the protagonist starts in one place in society and either winds up in another or gets stuck where they are. They can either be happy or unhappy about their initial place, their ultimate destination, or both. It starts when the character realizes they’re unhappy (either because their life has just been taken from them, or because they just can’t take it any more). This can be a bride who gets cold feet but ultimately decides to go through with the wedding, or a Horatio Alger hero who goes from rags to riches, or Raskolnikov going from prospective murderer to repentant sinner.
Character stories are subtle stories, and can make great subplots, too, because the story happens inside a person – how their actions and perceptions change, even if the external world does not. Many generational stories and immigrant tales, taking the family itself as the character, are character stories as they find their place in society and either accept that place or start the cycle of struggle over again.
Event
There is a rent in the world, and someone has to fix it. This can be the emergence of a Ring of Power and awakening of a dark lord, or a flood swamping the town, or the death of a patriarch leaving a power vacuum. We can learn things, people can change, but the beginning and end of the story is “the thing is broken” and “the thing is now fixed.” Characters can remain static – Card cites Indiana Jones, but ultimately his literary forebear Doc Savage is the perfect example. Someone has ground Prosper City to a halt and at the end Prosper City lives up to its name again – and Doc is the same rich globe-trotting knight-errant as ever.
The power here is that each of these frames provide different spectacles, in the French, different cadres to run the story by. Let’s work an example.
Let’s say I have in mind a Doña Ana Lucía story, where she goes to the zeppelin-cities of Lakshmi to recover the Jade Monkey from an old flame and restore it to Firstdown Colonial on Prithvi. The old flame has turned evil, and not only won’t release the Monkey, but tries to kill Doña Ana Lucía for it. However, a more dangerous enemy emerges seeking the Monkey, killing the old flame, leaving Doña Ana Lucía to avenge their death and escape with the Monkey (and a ton of regrets).
A neat plot, but it’s not really a story yet, is it?
If I wanted to play this as a milieu story, that’s simplicity itself – Doña Ana Lucía arrives on Lakshmi, conducts all her business there, cradles her dying ex in her arms, bewails the senseless death, confronts the killer, and …leaves. Circle opens, circle closes. Very useful if I want to play up how she’s a fish out of water, or take a tour of the place from the eyes of a newcomer, or maintain an outsider’s eye on the action as it proceeds.
If I wanted an idea story, the ultimate fate of the relic would remain in doubt for a long ways into the story. It would open as soon as Doña Ana Lucía asks “where is the Jade Monkey?” and end only when she lays eyes on it, over all the bodies she had to leave to get there. This would be an altogether murkier and more noirish story than the milieu version, which could be fun if I wanted to play with the relationships and ambiguous characters, and focus on Doña Ana Lucía’s intellectual prowess in cutting through all the fog and mystery to the truth behind it all – no matter who it costs her.
If I wanted to do it as a character story, I’d have her start after the Jade Monkey …but ultimately seek reconciliation with the old flame. She’d have a friend or idol decision, and likely fail it, having that moment of reconciliation only as the ex lay dying in her arms, and spend the rest of the story avenging their death to atone for the lost years they could have had together. If she gets the Jade Monkey at all, it will be a Pyrrhic victory and a bitter taste in her mouth. The focus of the story would be on the attempted reconciliation – and the vengeance to follow, with the Monkey increasingly incidental.
If I wanted to do this as an event story, the Monkey would have some kind of cosmic significance – the centerpiece of the Jade Scholars’ Hall’s museum, her museum, and she’s a laughingstock unless and until she gets it back. Or it rightfully belongs to the tribe descendant from the artist that carved it, and they are not really a people without it, and justice demands she retrieve it for them. She can romance her ex, narrowly evade death, avenge them…but the story ultimately ends when she returns the Monkey to where it belongs, stands back, and sees how the world has been put back in place.
I have written all four of these. I have written all four of these with la Doña. It takes a bare-bones plot description (and sometimes not even that) and makes it into a story, with color and shade and focus. It’s a set of spectacles, and I can take up the red ones and all appears bloodied or the yellow ones and all appears honeyed. I see different things from each view, and choose the ones I want to wear while I work this particular plot, this idea.
Take one of your own stories, one of freewritten children of a Bradbury list as breathed through Goldberg, and try on different MICE quotients on them before you parcel them out in quarters like Dent. See how many stories you can tell out of one magical noun in a list.
Next time, we’ll bring it all together.
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