November Theme: All Hail the MICE!
A crafty month about the mechanics of trying and failing
Ever since Douglas Adams, I knew MICE ruled the world
The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42
Chasing the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the little white mice built the Earth to work out the ultimate question once they found themselves unsatisfied with the ultimate answer, 42, of course.
And who could blame them after all those years of waiting? All those years wasted asking the wrong question.
Wasted time is why MICE could be the answer to my own ultimate question.
How do you tell stories that work?
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve written six novels that just didn’t work.
One reason they didn’t work was that I couldn’t wrap my head around story structure.
My fiction didn’t stack up properly.
I didn’t know how to lie in a convincing and enthralling way.
I kept asking the wrong question.
How can I learn to plan?
How can I change from a discovery writer, a pantser, to a planner?
How can I rewire my brain and walk away from an overactive imagination seeping up from my subconscious?
How can I leave behind my intuitive way of storytelling, that always felt right, like mysterious magic toward a forced and difficult method that must yield better results, surely?
I spent five years of trying every possible and improbable novel planning tactic. I nearly gave up on writing, because I squeezed the joy out of it.
Thinking through every detail spoiled the fun of finding out. I had made it a chore to white knuckle through. Like working from bed with the flu.
But then I changed tactics.
I tried flash fiction, and didn’t look back. I told stories short enough I couldn’t get stuck or lost in the tangle of plot threads. They were simple enough that I could get to the end without having plotted a course.
After 200 flash fiction pieces, I now know how to tell a tiny tale.
But what about longer stories?
Those more complex stories you thread together, where we weave each major piece and braid them together to make a broader, more richly detailed narrative tapestry.
Well, with those, you need a structure that has satisfaction built in.
With flash fiction you can wing it, you can write like I do, a discovery writer and just fling out a fragment of a story that feels complete.
Once you get the hang of it, it’s not that hard to do.
But longer stories are trickier because your reader wants more.
You’re lying in such exquisite detail their mind is looking for the cracks in your version of reality. In the beginning, a reader's mind is pure disbelief.
Readers know life is a struggle
We need struggle and conflict that matches life.
We need to have try/fail cycles that match the stories we’re telling.
The random meanness we throw at your characters can feel contrived or forced. Rather than logical consequences of their actions. Actions they must take because of the world they live in. And the type of story you’re telling.
So this month, we’re having a structure month
Don’t yawn or scream and run away. The craft knowledge for this will be in a single deep dive article — which you can choose to read or skip.
Each prompt will be super light and self-contained. You can pick up any one and run with it, taking on the challenge of writing a particular type of story.
Because we’re basing this on the MICE Quotient framework, the four prompts for November are easy to guess:
1. Milieu: A story about place 2. Inquiry: In Search of Answers 3. Character: Who am I? 4. Event: Oh damn! Now what?
Standalone Prompts
Each week I’ll give you the general idea and a bevy of examples. And you can run with it. Even by this simple osmosis, you’ll pick up more structured writing techniques.
And, if you dive into the Ultimate Guide to Using the MICE Quotient to Write Stories That Don’t Suck (working title) you’ll learn even more.
And hopefully, if you’re a struggling discovery writer like me, you’ll come away with a light and reusable story framework.
One that helps you tell stories that work, so you don’t waste a ton of time asking the wrong questions. Or writing novels that come unstuck.
And without requiring you to plan out every detail — a task that for pansters sucks the life out of our bones and grinds our stories into dust.
Who is this for?
So if you’ve graduated to Serial Writer, this is a good month for you to get stuck in to make those longer works work.
Who knows, it might even rescue those NanoWrimos that start seeing their stories unravel around the midway mark.
And for you determined flash writers, it’s still a very useful technique for understanding how to make your character struggle properly, for their actions and consequences to raise the tension properly, and for that ending to resonate ever more powerfully.
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