If you’ve been listening to Writing Excuses for any length of time, you’ve run across the MICE quotient. It’s a framework for creating and/or analyzing story structure, first conceived by Orson Scott Card and later refined by Mary Robinette Kowal, and mentioned on a bunch of the podcasts. I’ve found it great when critiquing stories, not so much as an absolute principle that you have to get right, but more as analysis tool when you already feel something isn’t working, and want to find out why. I’ve been meaning to write a post about it for a while now — nothing like writing something down to clarify your own thoughts on a subject. And also for others to whom I’m constantly raving about it. This post is for you, snail![1]
MICE stands for Milieu, Inquiry (or Idea in the original OSC version), Character, and Event. These four are elements that typically make up the stories we read and write.[2] Each one has a distinct starting point, way of resolving, and way of looking at conflict, i.e. what the story is “about”.
A story will have a main MICE element that defines what type of story it is, Milieu, Inquiry etc. But any story longer than flash can and will usually have more than one MICE thread, the longer the story, the more threads.[3] That can get messy for author and reader. The beauty of MICE is that it not only tells us which conflicts we need to keep track of, but also in which order the threads need to be resolved for the reader to walk away from the story satisfied. It’s pretty simple: you resolve the first element you started last, the second next to last etc. Just like you nest brackets when programming. That seems to be the way our reader brain processes these things best.[4]
So let’s go into the four elements in a little detail.
Milieu
Milieu stories are stories about places, environments, cultures, or any combination of these things. They start when the protagonist enters the milieu, and feature the conflicts that they have with or because of the environment. On a small scale, that can be anything that’s preventing the protagonist from leaving said milieu, on a larger story scale, that can be anything from culture shock to navigating an alien terrain. The milieu story is also often about the sense of wonder that the strange and unfamiliar environment evokes. The milieu story ends when the protagonist leaves, or when they decide to stay (as an alternative solution to the conflicts).
OSC lists James Clavell’s Shogun, and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as prototypical milieu stories. A lot of the adventure quest stories popular in the 1980s, think Jewel of the Nile or the Indy Jones films, are either straight milieu stories, or at least have milieu as one of the major elements to them. Portal fantasy and isekai are also usually milieu stories.
Note that a milieu story does not automatically mean character vs. nature conflict, although that type of conflict can be more prevalent in milieu stories. In general, the six types of conflict are orthogonal to MICE, as are genres.
Inquiry
These stories start when a question is introduced, are about answering said question, and end when the question is resolved. Inquiry stories are the most straightforward of the four elements to conceptualize. Obviously, detective stories have inquiry as the main element, but that doesn’t mean only mystery genre stories are inquiry — e.g. Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem has strong elements of inquiry.
Character
Character stories are about the protagonists place in the world, their group, their family, etc. It begins when they question that place, and ends when they find a new one. (Which can be identical to the starting point — see Dorothy’s “there’s no place like home” resolution of her character thread in The Wizard of Oz.) The conflicts in character stories will often be inner conflicts, but again, they don’t have to be — other characters will challenge them, as will society, and even character vs. nature conflicts can drive the C thread forward.
The confusing bit about character in MICE for me is the overlap with the various other uses of the term when we talk about literature and writing. Here, it just means the one whose story is being told.
Event
This is the most common story type in SFF, especially epic fantasy. Event stories start when two things happen: a. something goes out of whack, i.e. disrupts the status quo, and b. the character who can/will do something about it enters the scene. The disruption can be to the protagonist alone, their family, village, country, or the whole world — voilà, epic fantasy.
The story, and its conflicts, are around the struggle to fix the disruption. And an event story is resolved when a new status quo is reached. If you follow the “what the hero wants” vs. “what the hero needs” character arc, the new status quo won’t be identical to the one at the start of the story, at least not for the MC.[5] For an iconic hero, who doesn’t change, it might be a actual real fix. Or it can be completely different for everyone.
Using the MICE quotient in writing or editing
If all of this sounds interesting, there are worksheets on the internet you can download to map and plan out your MICE elements in a 3 act structure, with the threads opening in act 1, the try-fail-cycles cycling in act 2, and everything resolving in act 3. Personally, I don’t actually do that when planning a story, and the vast majority of writers doesn’t either — if a story works, it works, with or without MICE.
Instead, I use it when a story doesn’t work, as an analysis tool to find out why. An example: when writing the flash fiction piece “Herbert” for 99 Fleeting Fantasies, the end of the first version felt off, and I couldn’t figure out why. So I did the MICE analysis. I discovered that I had been confused about what type of story I had written. On the surface, it looked like event, the hatching of the egg being the disruption of the status quo. However, the story was never about fixing that disruption; it was about invoking a sense of wonder about Herbert’s journey and his intersection with the narrator’s life. So the story actually starts when the narrator (or the reader) enters the fleeting fantasy of Herbert’s life. That meant: milieu! It also meant that story needed to end with the narrator/reader exiting that fleeting fantasy in a clear and satisfying way. Once I had that, it was just a matter of changing the last paragraph to create that exit, and suddenly the story worked.
To summarize MICE as an analysis tool:
- Understand which type of story you are writing resp. which of the MICE elements each of your story threads represents,
- Make sure start, resolution and conflicts all fit that element, and
- Resolve the elements in reverse order.
Et voilà !
Notes:
[1] The version here is probably somewhere in between OSC’s and MRK’s version. It’s what works for me at the moment.
[2] Are there more elements? Possibly. But these four have worked well so far, so they are all we need for now.
[3] Mary Robinette actually had a formula somewhere that allowed you to calculate how many words adding an extra element, among other things, would add to a short story.
[4] Note that, like for many of our writing “rules”, we’re talking Western storytelling tradition. E.g. kishoutenketsu (起承転結) and its Asian relatives work quite differently, both from a narrative flow standpoint and how they view conflict, so MICE doesn’t apply in the same way.
[5] I am aware that I’m mixing up hero, protagonist and main character here. Right now, the distinction doesn’t matter, though.