Weekly Prompt: In Search of Answers
The Truth is Out There. Go Forth and Ask Good Questions.
Welcome to the second weekly challenge for November, where the theme is All Hail the MICE!
The goal is to get you to try out the MICE Quotient piece by piece to think about how you can structure your stories differently and use conflict and consequences that fit your story better.
So you managed to get in and get out. Stories about place make spatial sense and we have literary walls we can scale and doors to bash through.
The next form of MICE story is different, the Inquiry Story Type, are stories that revolve around a major question.
The main character's action is driven by the need to answer this question.
All the conflict (in this Inquiry thread) is based on the answers they receive.
Withholding information to create tension is a major no-no. So what we do instead is give unexpected or unhelpful information.
Answers that complicate or obstruct, forcing your character down a different path or creating a problem that must be dealt with before they can proceed.
That’s it in a nutshell.
Here are some examples to get that grey blob of porridge firing.
Mystery stories are the most common and what we first think of
- Who framed Roger Rabbit?
- Who killed the passenger on the Orient Express?
But you could pair your Inquiry with an Event to get a survival story:
- How do we survive a volcano in Los Angeles?
- How do I escape a skyscraper during a terrible earthquake?
- How the hell is Mark Watney going to science the shit out of this?
Science Fiction can also ask some really big questions
Questions pique our curiosity and compel us to see what happens or how the author imagines this mental simulation in exquisite detail.
- What is the monolith and should I hit with my nice bone?
- What will the impact of constant surveillance be on our populations?
- What happens when AI makes daily work obsolete?
- What if…
So this week it’s simple, ask a question and prevent your character from finding the answer easily.
Let them struggling with the clues, latch onto red herrings, chase shadows or be blown away by a truth they weren’t ready for.
Challenge Requirements
Your story must:
- Ask a question and your characters must struggle to answer it.
- Be min 100 and max 1000 words long, excluding the title, subtitle, and any post-story bio / links. (We use Medium’s own word count feature.)
- Be fictional, even if it includes factual information or concerns.
- Use “Inquiry” as one of your five tags.
Example Story:
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.” ― Voltaire
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