Recursive Story MICE on a Budget

It’s the ultimate in story-building technique: recursive story MICE on a budget. It all stems from Mary Robinette Kowal’s guest lecture for Sanderson’s writing course. Kowal floated the idea of a Word Budget, and applied to her  MICE Quotient down to the smallest component of story.

Kowal likes to think of story elements in terms of MICE – Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event, governed by the target word-count of the finished story. And Kowal’s breakdown of MICE applies at story, chapter and scene-level.

Think about it. A novel has a story arc that goes from opening problem through conflict to resolution. Within the whole novel, the chapters also need to deliver a story arc from opening problem through conflict to resolution. A chapter usually contains multiple scenes; perhaps two, three, or four scenes. Each scene has to deliver a satisfying story arc from opening problem through conflict to resolution.

It’s a recursive structure, much like a mathematical fractal, but don’t get hung up on that. The important thing is, good story structure applies from the smallest, lowest level to the highest. But how?

Break, Break,Break, Breakdown

Imagine a chapter of 2500 words with no scene breaks and there’s only one of each MICE element. It’s difficult to mess that up. Now add to the number of Milieu, Characters, Ideas and Events within the chapter, within the same word count. More story elements, more material, same number of words. Allocating words to elements becomes way more difficult. But the chapter is an arbitrary collection of scenes. This is where the real heavy lifting happens.

Imagine the same chapter broken into four scenes, about 650 words apiece. How many MICE elements does each scene have to describe? Each scene has to adequately explore all its MICE elements before it runs out of budget. Some MICE elements gain priority and a bigger share of the word budget. Some get scant attention, a smaller slice of the word count.

The next level of decomposition? Each meaningful dialogue between characters, let’s call it a micro-scene, also has to deliver a story arc using all the MICE elements loaded on it.

What happens when all the MICE exceed the word budget of the micro-scene, scene or chapter? Editing.

You might be able to flex the budget a little. But not every element gets equal billing, or equal word-count. Authors prioritize. They’ll skimp on setting or events, cut characters, reduce the scope of the plot, focus on one or two ideas not five or six.

You think that’s not possible?

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice isn’t a long book; 124,000 words in the standard edition. It is, for the prose style of the period, very economical with its word budget. Through chapters, scenes and micro-scenes, every single one completes its story arc right where it needs to. Some events are skimmed and summarised, some characters thinly sketched. There’s remarkably little setting in the novel’s Milieu; nothing of the regency, politics, economics, the Napoleonic Wars. Pride and Prejudice are the two central ideas.

Good Housekeeping

How far can you exceed the word budget before your novel becomes a bloated, overblown monster, lacking pace or clarity?

Writing is like good housekeeping; you can either increase the budget or reduce the number of MICE elements in the story. Sometimes, the genre and story type fix the budget. Balancing that budget means judicious cutting and editing.

I’ve come to like the idea of a Word Budget as a structural measure. The current project has short opening and closing chapters. They carry the MICE elements economically and complete their story arcs. In the middle chapters, the word budget expands a little so that each scene can include more MICE. But not so many MICE that the scene becomes hard to follow. The discipline of the word budget puts the focus on clarity and pace, from the lowest level micro-scene to the longest middle chapter.