What Drives Your Story?
February Total:
37,499 words (goal: 41,667 —4,268 under)
31,130 fiction
6,369 nonfiction
Read this month (links go to my Instagram reviews where applicable):
REAL LIFE — Brandon Taylor
THE SOLDIER'S SOUNDREL — Cat Sebastian
GIDEON THE NINTH — Tamsyn Muir (reread)
WHEN THE TIGER CAME DOWN THE MOUNTAIN — Nghi Vo
THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS — Micaiah Johnson
I listen to the writing podcast Writing Excuses regularly, and one of the most valuable things I've taken away from it is the idea of the MICE quotient. Adapted from Orson Scott Card, Mary Robinette Kowal argues that novels are roughly motivated by a maximum of two of the following: Milieu, Inquiry, Character, and Event.
(Find the image, and one of many Writing Excuses episodes to talk about this, here.)
Kowal argues that the shorter the book, the fewer of these you can balance, and that it's very unlikely you'll balance all four well and have an engaging story that works. A short story probably only centres one of Milieu, Inquiry, Character, or Event. Another element might be secondary, but it's probably driven by only one.
One of my favourite Alice Munro stories is in fact a trio of stories (I talk about them here), but each of them balance these elements differently: "Chance" is about an Event, a woman on a train stalled from a death while visiting a man on a whim (secondary Character element); "Soon" is about that same woman (primary Character element) visiting her ailing mother in her hometown (secondary Milieu element); and "Silence" is about that woman searching for her daughter (Inquiry) while trying desperately to establish herself without the man she met in "Chance" or the daughter she raised in "Soon" (secondary Character element). These are balanced to provide structure to theme: the Character is the throughline that connects the stories, but different emphases tell different stories about impulse and grief, about acting and not acting.
I apply the MICE quotient when I write—it's helpful to me especially in editing to bear in mind what my book actually prioritizes—but it's most helpful for reading analysis. Lately when I evaluate a book for a review, I'll assess what its central MICE quotient elements are (two primary, third secondary) as I'm assessing how successful it's been to make sure I'm giving it a fair shake at what it actually set out to do.
Different forms of storytelling set out to prioritize totally different storytelling elements. I'm 70 hours into Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which is hugely event-centered—and yet you completely forget about the central plot for hours at a time, sometimes to the point of putting the game down altogether, because you're given diversions of all kinds within the game world. I also used to be a lot more into TV than I am these days, primarily because the serialized nature builds characters in a way I love to death.
A prime example of a TV show that still affects how I write today but that totally failed at being a coherent piece of media is LOST. Rest in pieces, LOST. LOST gave me characters in a way I will never get again. Its first three seasons were specifically great for establishing character motivations for the event that drives the plot: why the hell were all these people on the plane in the first place?
LOST failed for a lot of reasons. Foremost among them was that they didn't finish it before hitting publish and, indeed, had no goddamn idea where they were going. (Never publish anything until it's finished!! me @ myself) Another is probably that they never tied up any ends until it was past time to plausibly do so in a satisfying way. But another may be that they tried to balance all four of these elements: they were stuck on the island because of an Event, the Character motivations were a huge part of what drove the story, and the island was so prominent in the plot that it ruined the show. AND THEN they added inquiry after inquiry, investigation after investigation, and then Sayid got with Shannon so someone would care when Ana Lucia shot her, and they just put Ben in with the Others to link this other, completely different story they wanted to tell without thinking it through—and those are the seasons I liked!
God, I want to watch LOST.
I digress; but it's LOST I'm talking about, so it's basically begging for a digression. Good stories know what's important about themselves, prioritize those things, and deprioritize the rest. A great show is Halt and Catch Fire, a story that asked a question: can these four idiots build the internet?—and then told you the four idiots as they tried to build the internet. There's an element of milieu to it, but life in 1980s Texas is more important to the characters' backgrounds than it is to the story itself. And, sometimes, very little happens in terms of events. And by gum if that's not the way it should be. Another example: a friend just read Becky Chambers' A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, a hugely character-centered book that didn't land as well with me because it felt more like linked short stories taking place within the same universe—but damn if it didn't know what it was about.
Then there’s the flip side—not being about enough. Right now I’m reading Kate Morton’s The Secret Keeper, an Inquiry- and Character-driven novel that started out with a question, and has diverted us from that question for many, many pages now. Sometimes it reminds us of the question, then gives us almost no new information before skittering away again. As a character-driven novel, it’s immersive, but it has trouble keeping momentum because few events happen, milieu isn’t nearly as important as character or inquiry, and the supposed engine—who was that man Laurel’s mother killed in the first chapter?—isn’t being addressed at all while Laurel is getting interviewed for a documentary and finds it difficult to answer questions while grieving her mother.
The Secret Keeper is widely enjoyed, and the prose is beautiful. I’m a guiltily avid consumer of Ian McEwan, another author who writes deeply immersive characters and often forgets about anything else for, really, far too long a time. (A Child In Time… On Chesil Beach… Solar… Enduring Love.) Some genres are guilty of languishing in one territory more than others—romance novels are another that can linger too long with the characters without a secondary element to carry it. But, by and large, I buy Kowal’s assertion that the stories with the best momentum prioritize two at most, add a third for flavour, and forget about the fourth entirely if it knows what’s good for it.
Don't be LOST. Don’t clog your story’s engine with what doesn’t need to be there. Be Halt and Catch Fire. Make sure your work knows what it's about.
You’ve been reading OUT OF CHARACTER. Let’s put something on the page.