The MICE quotient

I'm re-reading Orson Scott Card's excellent How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy book right now. It was published in 1990, but I'm struck by how universal his advice is, and how useful to today's writer the ideas still are.

Take the MICE quotient.  Card points out that all stories contain four elements, but that usually one of them is dominant in the story.  What are they?  The first is the milieu story.  Milieu stories are about the world, the planet, the society, the family, the weather.   

My novel Jade, about a sentient planet, is very definitely a milieu story.  In a milieu story the characters will go to a strange place that's different for ours, will see interesting things, and come back to what passes for normality a changed person.  Kaath in Jade certainly does that. She learns that her parents aren't who she thought they were, and they have a strong link with the spores that are an essential part of Jade's sentience.  

The second is the idea story.  It involves asking what happens when certain tech is invented, or why did complex alien civilisations disappear.  Idea stories ask a question, and then get the characters to answer it.  The plot of the story is about finding those answers.  In some respects, my novel Jade is an idea story too, as it's about the characters slowly uncovering the intertwined sentience of the planet.

The third type of story is the character story.  Elizabeth Moon's Vatta's war books are character stories.  They follow Kylara Vatta from being kicked out of her home world's Spaceforce to commanding a multi-world Space Defense Force.  She's all that  all that stands between civilized worlds and a vicious pirate. Quite a change of fortune for the wronged Ky.

The fourth type of story is the event story.  It starts when something is wrong with the universe, the world is out of order.  The event could be the appearance of aliens in a planet's skies, as in Anne McCaffrey's Treaty Planet, or the reappearance of ancient evil thought to be dead, as in the rise of Sauron in The Lord of The Rings.

Most stories contain elements of all four types, but knowing which type is strongest in your story can help to keep you on track and checking that your story is doing what it should.

The Characters of trees

Driving through the bare deciduous woodland forest yesterday got me thinking about the nature of trees and the roles they play in our stories.

If we want the planets we design to be suitable for humans to live on they have to have some mechanism for keeping the atmosphere as we need it.  On Earth trees fill this role magnificently, taking in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. We wouldn't have an atmosphere we could breathe if it wasn't for the trees and other plants that maintain it.

Thinking about convergent evolution, any planet that has a suitable atmosphere for us is likely to have some form of trees.  But rather than seeing these familiar parts of the landscape as limiting our world design, we can embrace them as characters.

Tolkien famously did this in The Lord of the Rings with Treebeard the Ent, who takes the tree as character to its extreme as he can walk about and talk.  I did something rather different in my short story The Scent of Other Lives (one of the stories in my ebook collection Otherlives).  There the trees have branches they can move like limbs, and they communicate in some kind of telepathic way.

We can use them as characters who are conspicuous by their absence, as in Sarah Crossan's Breathe.  Her story is a cautionary ecological tale about what happens when we cut all the trees down.  There the few that exist are  hidden from view and tended in ways full of ritual.  

Avatar invented a new take on the idea of trees being the witnesses to our history.  The Tree of Souls was the keeper of the Na'vi's memories, the centre of their spirituality and history.  

In my book Panthera : Death Song the trees of the rainforest become characters.  Their denseness prevents my humans from doing things, and they provide home and sustenance for the jagothera big cats.  I've tried to capture the magic of the tropical sun rising and setting through the canopy, the dark foliage silhouetting a crimson and golden sky.

As well as being the essential lungs of an ecosystem, trees can be home.  Think of the massive Hometree in Avatar, a tree so huge it was a living cathedral.  Tall trees reaching into the sky give a planet a sense of continuity.  These guardians of the atmosphere have been here for many human generations, and will last for many more to come - if we don't cut them down.