Of M.I.C.E. and Writers: Orson Scott Card on Story Writing

[MOD: Kathleen says this is more an overview of one section of each book rather than a full-blown review, but we thought it would be of interest, both because Card is LDS and because there are so many aspiring writers on the list. Let us know whether you'd like to see more articles like this.]

Card's M.I.C.E. factors are introduced in his book on writing, Characters and Viewpoint, in the following way:

Four basic factors that are present in every story, with varying degrees of emphasis. It is the balance among these factors that determines what sort of characterization a story must have, should have, or can have.
     The four factors are milieu, idea, character, and event:
     The milieu is the world surrounding the characters -- the landscape, the interior spaces, the surrounding cultures the characters emerge from and react to; everything from weather to traffic laws.
     The idea is the information that the reader is meant to discover or learn during the process of the story.
     Character is the nature of one or more of the people in the story -- what they do and why they do it. It usually leads to or arises from a conclusion about human nature in general.
     The events of the story are everything that happens and why.
     These factors usually overlap. Character A is part of the milieu surrounding Character B. The idea in the story may include information about the nature of a character; the idea we are meant to discover can be some aspect of the milieu, some previously misunderstood or overlooked event, or the nature of a character. The events of the story are usually performed by characters or emerge from the milieu, and the discovery of an idea can also be an event in the tale.
     Each factor is present in all stories, to one degree or another. Every factor has an implicit structure; if that factor dominates a story, its structure determines the overall shape of the story.

In Characters and Viewpoint (hereinafter referred to as C), Card discusses these factors with respect to how characters are treated by a writer. In How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (hereinafter referred to as H), Card discusses the implicit structures of these factors and how the dominate factor relates to the shape of the story.

There are two kinds of stories in which milieu dominates, but both serve the author's purpose of showing a place to the reader. Card discusses both kinds in C, but only the first kind in H. The first kind can be described as a "fish out of water" story. In order for the reader to explore this place, the author introduces a stranger to the place, and that stranger serves as the point of view character. Card points out in C that this character must be as normal as possible so that the reader will concentrate on the milieu and not be distracted by the character. The author of such stories wants a character as transparent, as Everyman-ish as possible for this kind of story. Examples of such stories are SHOGUN, The Wizard of OZ, and Gulliver's Travels. In this kind of milieu-dominated story, the structure requires that the story begin when, or shortly before, the character enters the unfamiliar milieu. The story must end when, or just after, the character leaves the milieu -- or decides not to leave, but to "go native" instead.

The second kind of milieu-dominated story is one in which there is no stranger, and Card only discusses it in C. "The characters' own attitudes and expectations are part of the cultural ambience, and their very strangeness and unfamiliarity is part of the readers' experience of the milieu." Card lists Dune and Lord of the Rings as examples of this, but most historical fiction, fantasy fiction, and science fiction can be of this type. In fact, if an author wants the reader to believe that the characters are part of their milieus, the author needs to be conscious of things like cultural ambience when developing the characters, selecting which of their actions to show, and which of their thoughts to disclose to the reader. An important thing to remember in such milieu-dominated stories is that the characters can and must take things for granted, but the author must be very conscious of those things and take nothing for granted.

Idea-dominated stories are perhaps the most simply structured. A question is raised at the beginning and the answer comes at the end. Card includes mysteries and caper stories in this group. The question is whodunit in idea-dominated mysteries (or howdunit, or how the detective figures it out, as in the Columbo mysteries -- all questions), and in caper stories, it is how to solve the problem of stealing the whatever, conning the rich man, robbing the bank, etc. Many science fiction stories are idea-dominated stories, as well.

Strong characterization does not need to be given high priority in idea-dominated stories, and for that reason they often not well-regarded in the field of literature. Card's discussion of idea-generated stories doesn't differ much between C and H, except that in C he mentions allegories, in which he says idea is everything. "The author has composed the story according to a plan; the reader's job is to decode the plan. Characters in allegory are rarely more than figures standing in for ideas. While allegory is rarely written today, many writers of academic/literary fiction use symbolism in much the same way -- characters exist primarily to stand for an idea, and readers must decode the symbolic structure in order to receive the story."

Card claims that most character-dominated stories are "not about the character's character; that is, the story is not about who the character is.

"The Character Story is a story about the transformation of a character's role in the communities that matter most to him." He says this in H, but it isn't much different from what he says in C: "The character story is about a person trying to change his role in life. It begins at the point when the main character finds his present situation intolerable and sets out to change; it ends when the character either finds a new role, willingly returns to the old one, or despairs of improving his lot." I submit that many character-dominated stories are about a different kind of role change: when a character finds himself in a new, unexpected role, and tries to return to the old one. Such stories end when the character succeeds in returning to the old role, decides to accept the new role, or finds another role entirely.

In C, Card defines role as a "network of relationships with other people and with society at large." He points out that each of us has many relationships. A short story would probably only be able to deal with one or two, where a novel could deal with changes in all of a character's relationships. Card also points out in C that the old role may be easy to leave, but a new role difficult to find or enter -- just as, in other stories, the old role may be extremely hard to give up, no matter how clear and desirable the new role may be. "The most complex and difficult character stories are the ones about people who try to change a relationship without abandoning the person." Examples cited by Card in H are Carson McCuller's Member of the Wedding and The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

Card explains in H that while good characterization will strengthen any kind of story, it is absolutely essential to character-dominated stories. Readers of such stories "will accept the narrative equivalent of an `establishing shot.' After all, if we are to care whether the character succeeds in changing, we must understand what it is he's changing from. . . . If the transformation of character is what you care about most in the story you want to tell, then identify which character's changes trigger all the other transformations. That's your main character, and your story begins when he can't take it anymore."

That covers milieu, idea, and character-dominated stories. Tomorrow: The event-driven story.

Yesterday's column covered milieu, idea, and character-dominated stories, and today we move on to the fourth kind Card identifies: the event story.

The event-dominated story, Card asserts in C, "might well be the reason for the existence of Story itself. It arises out of the human need to make sense of the things happening around us; the event story starts with the assumption that some sort of order should exist in the world, and our very belief in order in fiction helps us to create order in reality."

This effort to make sense is handled in event-dominated stories by introducing a character or group of characters who has reached a point of deciding to do something about the imbalance or disorder in the world. The story reaches its resolution when either a new order is created or the old order is restored.

Card offers several examples of this kind of wrongness: in H he lists "the appearance of a monster (Beowulf), the `unnatural' murder of a king by his brother (Hamlet) or a guest by his host (Macbeth), the breaking of an oath (Havelok the Dane), the conquest of a Christian land by the infidel (King Horn), the birth of a child of portent who some believe ought not to have been born (Dune), or the reappearance of a powerful ancient adversary who was thought to be dead (Lord of the Rings)." In C he offers "a crime unpunished or unavenged" (The Count of Monte Cristo), "a person who has lost his true position in the world" (The Prince and the Pauper), and "an illicit love that cannot be allowed to endure and yet cannot be denied" (Wuthering Heights).

In H, he recommends Tolkien's use of the viewpoint character as the guide to the world out of order, and warns against letting the narrator explain how things are. "He begins, instead, by establishing Frodo's domestic situation and then thrusting world events on him, explaining no more of the world situation than Frodo needs to know right at the beginning. We only learn of the rest of the foregoing events bit by bit, as the information is revealed to Frodo."

Also in H, Card warns authors against a dangerous tendency in writing event-dominated stories: imagining that "their poor reader won't be able to understand what's going on if they don't begin with a prologue showing the 'world situation.' Alas, these prologues always fail. Because we aren't emotionally involved with any characters, because we don't yet care, the prologues are meaningless. They are also usually confusing, as a half-dozen names are thrown at us all at once. . . . Homer didn't need to summarize the whole Trojan War for us; he began the Iliad with the particular, the private wrath of Achilles. Learn from Homer -- and Tolkien. . . . Begin small, and only gradually expand our vision to include the whole world. If you don't let us know and care about the hero first, we won't be around for the saving of the world. There's plenty of time for us to learn the big picture."

Card concludes this discussion by talking about how the writer decides which factor or factors dominate the story. There are two things to consider: what the author is most concerned with in telling the story, and what the reader expects from the way the author starts the story. In the writing process, the author should consider the above factors not only in the planning stages, but in the rewrite stages, examining what actually comes through in the text. If the author starts out to write an idea-dominated story and finds that a particular character "takes over," then the author should consider rewriting the material into a character-dominated structure, and so on.

Much of the dissatisfaction readers experience at the end of a story can be attributed to expecting one kind of story and reaching an ending that resolves a different kind of story. The author promises an idea story by starting with a puzzle, but ends with a role change for the main character, for example. In H, Card referred to a student story involving someone giving directions to a person who Turned Out To Be (famous last words) the narrator's secret lover. This "mystery" approach did not work because "the writer had to labor so hard to conceal what was actually going on in the story, he was unable to accomplish anything except concealment. The entire story consisted of withholding from the reader every speck of information that would have made the story interesting." He goes on to explain how this could have been a character-dominated story, an event-dominated story, and even a milieu-dominated story. Card suggests watching for efforts to withhold information in the writing process -- and then determining why the reader should care with such information withheld.

Card gives a rule of thumb on the structure of a story, in C: "Readers will expect a story to end when the first major source of structural tension is resolved. If a story begins as an idea story, the reader expects it to end when the idea is discovered, the plan unfolded. If the story begins as a milieu story, readers will gladly follow any number of story lines of every type, letting them be resolved here and there as needed, continuing to read in order to discover more of the milieu. A story that begins with a character in an intolerable situation will not feel finished until the character is fully content or resigned. A story that begins with an unbalanced world will not end until the world is balanced, justified, reordered, healed -- or utterly destroyed beyond hope of restoration."

No fully realized story is overwhelmed by any one factor -- they all need milieu, ideas, characters, and events -- but every story has some factors that are more important than the others. If the author is not aware of these factors and how they are manifested in the story, how they affect the structure of the story, and what they promise the reader, the strength of the story will not be under the control of that author. Any successes will be accidental, and the odds will be against their recurrence.

It behooves every author to consider these things in every story written, and it enhances the readers' appreciation of a story if readers know about them and how they work. With these particular M.I.C.E., the best laid plans of authors can oft go aright.

Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury  <workshop@burgoyne.com>

------
Kathleen Dalton-Woodbury is the wife of a chemical engineer, the mother of
three girls and two cats, and the author of six short stories published in
various anthologies.  She runs a by-mail support network for new and aspiring
science fiction and fantasy writers as well as the Hatrack Writers Groups on
Orson Scott Card's website <www.hatrack.com>.  She also teaches a short story
writing workshop at her local night school (East High in Salt Lake City,
Utah).