Episode 108: How do you wrap up story threads satisfactorily?

In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Sun card to guide their discussion. They discuss what the MICE Quotient is and how to utilize it to improve your writing.

Question of the week: How do you resolve the loops that you opened? Do you follow the MICE quotient? Share your answer here.

Show Notes

Short Story Structure with Mary Robinette Kowal 

MICE Quotient on Writing Excuses 

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Transcript

Crys: Hello, friends. Welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is August 18th, 2022, as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my co-host…

JP: JP Rindfleisch.

Crys: How was your writing week, JP?

JP: Yes.

Crys: Yes, it existed?

JP: It existed. It was good. I hit a road bump in the Publish in Six, I think, because whenever I get to, I don’t know, 20%, I’m just like, this is trash. Just like I’m sure everyone else is. So I took a day off of it. I worked on my other project, which I got the first round of edits done. And then I came back to it today and I was like, this is less like trash and more like recycled goods. So then I started working on it and it functioned a little better. So I just needed like a day away from it to do other things.

Crys: I occasionally feel like really narcissistic because a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, I found my old writing and it was terrible. And I’m almost like, oh my gosh, I found my old writing, it was way better than I expected.

JP: Sometimes that happens to me. I’m just like, this wasn’t as bad as I remember. And I’m like, okay well, whatever.

Crys: My writing week did not happen last week. The kiddo’s birthday was on Friday, so we had celebration things on Friday and Saturday because of school. And I can only do one thing in my life at a time. So last week I was mom, and we got our new oven last week, and so Thursday and Friday I completely didn’t write, period. Monday I also did not write cuz it was Costa Rican Mother’s Day. And what did they do on Costa Rican’s Mother Day? Give the kids the day off school.

JP: That’s not what they do here.

Crys: Right. Well, ours is on Sunday. Yeah. But it was fun, like we went and did fun things. But, so three days completely wiped off the charts. But yesterday and Tuesday I, I got my writing in. I didn’t quite get 2000 words yesterday, I got 1600, but like 2000 is, is my goal of like, once I can get to that consistently every day, that’s my level of steadiness that I want to be at.

Will I push myself to do more than that? Maybe. Just depending on if I feel like I’m not gonna be pushing myself towards exhaustive burnout where I’ll be like, oh, let’s do a little bit more than I did yesterday, oh, let’s do a little bit more than I did yesterday. I don’t want that. But I do want consistently 2000 words days. Fingers crossed.

JP: Yeah. Regardless of the fact that your week was jampacked with fun momming, that sounds wonderful. That sounds like it was a good week.

Crys: Yeah, pretty decent. There’s lots of cake and frosting, who wants anything else?

JP: Oh, I want cake and frosting. Can I give you a quick mug cake update?

Crys: Yes, please.

JP: Okay. So one, I know how to make mud cake and I know how to make decent mud cake. I made mud cake yesterday, and it was mud. I don’t know what happened, it like uncooked itself, and there was just, it was weird. I didn’t like it. So that’s for Janet, just if you’re listening. I don’t know what happened. I think I added too much oil and it was just like a weird oily mess. It was weird. I didn’t like it.

Crys: Yeah. When I get a microwave, which they’re just ridiculously expensive here. You can’t get one for like less than 60 bucks and you have to really work for one that’s 60 bucks. Like most of them are over a hundred bucks, just for a cheapo one. So I don’t have a microwave, but when I do, I will join the mug cake club, which I was a strong member of before I moved here.

JP: You just need to get ramekins and you can be like the oven mug cake person.

Crys: I also have not been able to find ramekins. If I find ramakins, I’m becoming the crème brule queen. That’s just how that’s going.

JP: That does sound wonderful. I can’t make it until I find a good replacement.

Crys: Yeah, it would take a lot of replacements. You’re like, and nothing is the same except the sugar.

JP: And this is quote unquote “creme brule”. Like it’s not, yeah.

Crys: It’s chia seeds.

JP: Yeah, basically.

Crys: So our question this week is inspired by the tarot card, The Sun. We are nearing the end of the Arcana. Can you give us a description of The Sun, JP?

JP: Yes. So for reference, The Sun is three from the end. And it is where everything of the moon card, which was the previous one, is all about mysteries and whatnot, The Sun is all about positivity, fun, warmth, the success, vitality. And in reverse, it can mean inner child, feeling down, or overly optimistic.

Sun card is just this positive card. It’s a large, bright sun that shines in the sky, representing the source of all life on earth. Underneath that are four sunflowers that grow tall above a brick wall, representing the four suits of the Minor Arcana and the four elements. There is a young child sitting on top of a calm, white horse. Child being the joy and all that fun, pure liveliness.

Crys: Yes. And so we’re getting near the end, but we’re not to the end. We’re not talking about necessarily like the full ending of your story, but we’re getting to like the feel-good parts. Maybe not necessarily Denouement, but like where successes have been happening or past the dark night of the soul.

And how do you get that accomplished feeling to your readers when you hit this point of the story? Like how do you deliver, JP?

JP: What a big question. So I think our question… what was our question of the week?

Crys: Yeah, it was a vague like talking about the MICE quotients.

JP: Yeah. Yeah. In terms of that, I guess we need to define MICE quotient, just in case.

Crys: Yes.

JP: Do you want to do that?

Crys: So, MICE or MACE quotient is a style of structure developed by Orson Scott Card, But most widely taught by Mary Robinette Kowal these days. I’ll try and put some clips in the show notes of things where she’s expanded on that on YouTube or on other podcasts.

But basically, it’s four different styles of plot threads that you can use in your writing to, one, keep track of where in the world you’re going and what kind of story you’re telling. But two, to also close in a way that is emotionally satisfying for your readers.

This part of the explanation is gonna be a little difficult without having a visual, but if you are at all familiar with code, you’ll grab this right away. But say you’re writing an HTML document. Most people have a little bit of experience with this these days. When you open a bracket, say you wanna make a part of your text bold, you open a bracket, use the code for bold, which is B or strong, close the bracket, put the text that you want in there, do another open bracket, but then you do a slash that says, hey, we’re ending this, then do your bold, and then your closed bracket.

When you’re doing this, you can’t mix up the order that you end brackets. So you can’t say I wanna do bold italic, but then end bold italic. You have to close them in the reverse order that you open them. So you go bold, italic, bold. In the same way, when you are opening plot threads, you have to close them in reverse order.

So the four plot types in the– I’m gonna go with MACE quotient because it’s a little bit easier to comprehend the second letter. M is Milieu. So this is Gulliver’s travels. The story starts when you enter a place, it ends when you leave a place. So you know that the plot thread is started when you enter a new place. And then a plot thread has ended when you’re able to leave that place. And the question that is usually asked is how do we get out of here? It’s not just, oh, we are going somewhere and then we’re leaving. It’s like, how do we get out of this place that we’ve gone to?

Then the second letter, which in MICE is inquiry, but in MACE is ask answer, is you have a question. This is the detective novel’s main thread. You ask a question, the plot thread is done when that question is answered. Who killed Joe Schmo at the library? When you figure out who killed Joe Schmo, you’ve answered that plot thread.

C is character. It starts with a character who is unsatisfied with some aspect of their life, and the plot thread ends when they have either come to accept that part of their life, or they’ve changed it. That one’s my favorite one. There’s so much room there.

But then there’s also the event. This is your action plot threads. Something big happens, for some reason my brain always goes to the big alien movies. Aliens invade, and then we have to deal with it. And the event plot thread ends when you’ve come to a new status quo of dealing with whatever happened to start the plot thread off the event.

All of these get mixed up in a story. So let’s use The Wizard of Oz as an example. In the beginning, it’s character. Dorothy’s unsatisfied with her life.

Then we go into milieu I would believe, cuz the tornado can be an event, but it’s mostly Milieu. She goes to Oz. Before you can settle up the character thread, you have to settle up the milieu thread of getting her out of Oz, and then she can settle up her character thread of Recognizing how she’s changed or like how her internal self has changed rather than her external self.

And all these plot threads can sprinkle all in. But as we’re getting to the end, we wanna satisfy those in reverse order. And the more you can satisfy, the more of the bigger plot threads you can satisfy closer together at the end, the more emotional payoff it’s gonna have for the reader.

But what if you’re writing a series? And I think this is where you were headed with your question.

JP: I love the HTML thing and that’s how I view it, but also an easier method would be like the Russian nesting dolls because you can’t put them back together without having to go to the smallest and get to the largest bit. And even though like we have long running series, I still try to satisfy this MICE quotient, regardless. Because I’ve found that when coming to a close, I’ll either read through an outline or we’ll get to the end of it and I’ll see that maybe one of those endings has been reversed and it doesn’t hit, it feels a little different. So then I look at it and I’m like, okay, how can I flip these around? And then it almost like it comes off better. Like, we usually get more of a response from it. We notice that with the short story and I think with one of our books, I think book one.

And I really love the idea of MICE quotient. I really love the idea of opening and closing loops and then leaving little questions at the end. So what I like to do is with series, which is it’s like difficult, I’m like, I don’t know. I love to open up a new question near the end that kind of overlaps into the next book but satisfy anything that came from the beginning. So it’s almost like there’s a secondary MICE that opens up near like 75% mark that will get closed out in that second book. Or something along those lines where there’s just a broader question that might get closed later, but there’s still these contained loops that exist within the story.

Crys: Yeah, with the romance because I’m switching to a new character pairing every book, when I throw in a loop at the end, a cliff hanger, I almost always do it like in the last 1% to 5%. And it will be like, I may have alluded to then one of the next characters like emotional wound so that people are like getting invested in them, but it’s not like a true open loop yet.

And then I’ll often throw kind of an event open loop at the very end of the book, after everything’s been settled, we’re in the Denouement. And then in the last bit, there’s like, oh no, something big has happened that is going to affect this next character but doesn’t affect the main character. So it doesn’t affect the satisfaction of the story I told. And then it’ll return to the main couple again for just a last little bit, a last little mushy seed. We gotta have that fluff ending in romance that really nails the feels. And then I go onto the next book.

Now, when I start the next book, I might not start immediately with that cliff hanger that I left with. I might go back a little bit further in time from that character’s point of view and give you probably a character opening rather than an event opening. And then like within a chapter I’ll get to that event opening, like right quick.

But like a question or an event are the two cliffhangers I really enjoy employing with romance to lead you into the next book, even if the next book is not gonna be mostly frameworked by that plot type. I think most of my books tend to be frameworked by the type. But those two are the most effective at your wham bam, ring you into the next book.

JP: I think too, and this would be why like prologues are so useful in things like epic fantasy or long running series, in my opinion, is that is a really easy way to make a loop that could close at the end of a series by having a prologue at the beginning.

So for example, in the Ackerman series, our big opening loop we show the really big, bad characters right at the beginning. But then this story is about a character that was sent out by the big, bad characters. So it’s almost like we’ve opened this loop that is going to come to a close near the end of our series. And then we started opening the loops that were part of this book.

And I don’t know if that would help anyone, but I think that’s something that I like to do. I like prologues, especially within the fantasy realm, because especially when I think of things like anime or manga, like they open up those really big loops right at the beginning, just so that you are as a reader prepared for what’s about to come. That this is gonna be a long battle. This is gonna be a long story. And that what you are about to read is just a small snippet of that.

Crys: Yeah. When I think of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, Storm Lake Archives is the series, The Way of Kings is the first book. The first book opens with a scene that is, I forget, like 10 to 30 years before the main story takes place. And an assassin kills the king, and so you are left hanging with this ask answer plot thread. Who killed the king? Who sent him? And why? We don’t know, we have no idea.

And that hovers over all of the books as we’re working towards that answer, which I’m sure won’t come until at least the end of book five. He plots things really interesting, but I think he’s planning this series in two, five book arcs. But we might not get the answer until the end of book 10.

And the other big series that comes to mind which Sanderson worked on was Robert Jordan’s– what’s the big series?

JP: Oh, I don’t know why my brain gave out. Wheel of Time.

Crys: Thank you. Yeah, Wheel of Time. It starts out with a very strange scene– cuz I haven’t finished the series so I have no idea what happens that ties us in– this very strange scene of despair and this guy like wailing about everybody being dead. And it’s a wheel of time, so everything goes in circles, you know that very early on. But how this circle, like this scene of like death, destruction, and despair ties into this small group of friends and acquaintances from this tiny town getting thrust into the wider politics of the world and war and destiny, I don’t have a clue. But someday we’ll get there.

and we’re left with these questions that are framing the entire series and giving you the promise that it’s epic. That there’s, there’s more to come.

JP: And if you think about it, if that gets answered within that first book, as a reader, you’re almost like what’s the point of the rest of it. And it’s the same, in my opinion, with this whole MICE quotient.

Now, if you don’t follow MICE quotient, that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, but in my mind using the MICE quotient, it’s almost like if I’m not fulfilling it in that same pattern, then the next thing to be resolved, it’s almost like what’s the point.

So for example, Dorothy, if the big opening is Dorothy’s character, her dissatisfaction with the location she’s in, and then she realizes that she’s actually happy with where she was before she gets back home, that almost becomes a different story. It becomes another journey of her getting back home after realizing that home was always in her heart. But if she’s able to close the loop of returning back home and then getting that like character, that dissatisfaction, and like resolving that it, it closes it and tightly packages everything nicer. And that’s almost like what happens when you reverse things as you close them out, is you’re almost opening, or the potential to open another loop, or break something.

Crys: Absolutely. What question would we like to ask our listeners this week?

JP: How do you resolve the loops that you opened? Do you follow the MICE quotient? Have you used the MICE quotient before? Or do you follow a different path?

Crys: Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us this and every other week. We are about to go record our podcast episode, which is where we’re using The Sun card to inspire our business question of the week, which this week is about reorienting to joy in writing.

And you can find that over at www.patreon.com/writeawaypodcast, along with all of our other patron exclusive posts.

JP: See you later.