Ooh, I make it sound so fancy. I watched a YouTube video.
(Although, in all fairness, a commenter under said video said he couldn’t believe it was free.)
It was a lecture, about 45 minutes long, and I’ll link it here so you can watch the whole thing. (Ms Kowal’s a great writer and teacher, so even if you’re already a short story expert it wouldn’t hurt to watch.) Read this bite-size version before you go there, though, and write along if you will.
Let’s talk about MICE
There are four types of stories:
Milieu (M) - A character’s trying to get from Point A to Point B. Between those two points are a bunch of difficulties that make the story.
Character enters → Difficulty → Character exits
Inquiry (I) - The character wants to figure something out.
Question → No answers for you! → Answer
Character (C) - This is an internal struggle. The character wants to know something about himself, or change something about himself.
Character → Unhappy (May or may not include self-loathing) → Things happen → Happy
Event (E) – This is an external struggle. Something (major or minor) happens that disrupts the world as the character knows it. Think zombie apocalypse, pandemic, rainfall.
Status-quo disruption → Ta-da!
Stories often use multiple MICE threads. Consider your favourite book series, or even a single movie. Some involve all four. The key is to make sure each thread is solved by the story’s end.
Embrace your villainy
As a writer, your job is to make it near impossible for your character to reach their goal. Think how boring it would be if a story existed about a girl who wanted to find her father, and the next scene, she found her father. Liiiike? When you can throw in an entire scene where she has to cross a river of piranhas while dragging her injured pet piglet?
You can do it like this.
Open with promises
Okay, we’re in the meat of the writing proper. (The lecture had students write a 250-ish word piece of fiction, but the same rules could apply to longer pieces.)
Introduce your story in 3 sentences (bonus points if you can do it in 2). Each one should serve a different purpose:
Tell us Who: From whose point of view are we looking? Give them a particular mannerism, a voice. Let’s sense their attitude. Also, what are they doing?
Tell us Where: Use sensory detail to show where. Instead of just saying someone’s in the hospital room, talk about the sharp smell of the disinfectant, or the sounds from heart rate monitors.
Tell us the Genre: Say something unique and specific that tells if this is science fiction, or fantasy, or a romance.
(It might take longer to do if you’re writing a longer piece of fiction, but for short stories it’s important to establish all of these early.)
I’m a good student (mostly, some of the time), so naturally I wrote along. She gave us five minutes, called it a ‘luxury.’ Bruh. Here's what I came up with:
‘The chains on her ankles drew taut as she lunged, yanking her back before she reached the prison doors. She collapsed against the wall, the cold clay warring with the fire in her bones. She gritted her teeth, aware she was fighting a losing battle with exhaustion, the red, glowing manacles on her wrists slowly sapping her strength.’
Ei move on quickly and stop dwelling on the flaws ah.
Conflict
We got another 2 sentences (2!), and 3 minutes (it could’ve been 2, I don’t remember) to tell:
What’s your character trying to do? Why?
What’s stopping them?
I wrote this:
‘She had to leave now, if finding the griffin before midnight was still in her future. If only these stupid manacles would fall away!’
Onwards please.
The Try-Fail Cycle
Aha. Now’s time to throw things at them. Enter, the Try-Fail section:
Yes, but: Your character makes progress, but they soon hit a wall.
No, and: Your character makes no progress, and gets pushed even further back.
It helps if you let it be known that your character has already tried at least a few times.
You get five minutes, and five sentences. What I wrote:
‘The keys, placed mockingly out of reach, beckoned. Not for the first time, she sought a long pole with which to reach them, her creation magic useless in the face of the iron manacles. A splintered piece of bark on one wall stuck out to her, and she crawled hastily to it. She yanked. The promising piece of wood sliced her palms, and she yelped.’
End of Try/ Fail section
Here’s the three-quarter effect. You’re getting to the story’s end. You’re thinking of a resolution. It can be one of two ways:
Yes, and: They’re reaching their goal! Hurray!
No, but: They are not reaching their goal. But maybe their goal was the friends they made along the way. 🙂
Foiv minutes, foiv sentences:
‘She fell back on the floor, massaging her bloody palms. A sharp, hard object poked the back of her head when she lay down. In the giant moonlight streaming in through the back window, her eyes lit up. Her hairpin! Pain in her throbbing palms forgotten, she reached into her hair.’
Mirror the beginning
We’re at the end. We opened some mice threads (in my case, one Milieu thread), and we’ve got to tie them neatly. The questions we answered in the opening three sentences (Who, Where, and Genre) make a reappearance. Genre becomes Mood, and this has often changed from the beginning. Regardless of whether goals have been reached or nay, make the ending satisfying.
I think it was 3 sentences and 3 minutes…?
‘She smiled at the long narrow piece of metal in her hand, light bouncing off it. Holding the pointy end toward the keyhole, she watched more than felt the hairpin twist. Energy surged through her the instant the shackles fell off her wrists, amber sparks fizzing between the fingers she held toward the door.’
Well that was fun.
Absolutely flawed (sentences were too long, not enough sensory detail, etc etc). But yeah, it’s a quickly written first draft, and it forced me to write a 250ish word short story in a few minutes, a pretty big feat considering I write waaaay too many words and tend not to finish everything I start to write. I’ll clean up the story a little more and post it when I’m done 🤞.
You too write your own and share with me.
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