There is nothing like the initial lightning strike of a good idea. It’s electrifying, and all you want to do is capture that lightning in a bottle before it dissipates. Lines of dialogue, character traits, and plot points are hitting you left and right, and you’re pretty sure this will be the best novel ever.
Just one question for you: are you sure what you’ve got there is actually a novel, and not a short story? Or a novella? Or a ten-book series?
If you’re like me, you can get so caught up in the excitement, you might misjudge what you’re looking at. That’s where the MICE quotient can come in handy with its logical, mathematical approach to determining the ideal length of a potential project. Maybe it’ll save you a round or two of revisions!
What is the MICE Quotient?
Orson Scott Card is credited with inventing the concept, but I first heard about it from award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal on the Writing Excuses podcast. Put simply, the MICE quotient is a formula that breaks a story down into its components and mathemagically calculates the approximate final word count of a given project.
Before I get to the formula, let’s break down that acronym, shall we?
M is for Milieu
This is perhaps the easiest to wrap your head around. Milieu is the kind of conflict that focuses on entering and then the difficulty of exiting a place. You’re also focusing on the individual details that make up the setting while you write. When your character is thrown in jail cell, your milieu is the conflict of how to get out of that jail cell, or how to survive within the jail cell.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean setting, exactly. It is setting-based conflict. If your character happens to be sitting in jail throughout the story and doesn’t make an attempt to escape or really struggle in that environment, you probably shouldn’t count it as a milieu thread.
I is for Inquiry (Originally: Idea)
Inquiry just means a question and an answer. That is to say, the plot thread here begins with the question being asked and ends when that question has an answer.
Question: “Who poisoned the punch?”
Once the question is asked, an investigation ensues.
Answer: “The butler poisoned the punch!”
C is for Character
You can think of this as solely the distilled character arc—the character’s transformation within the story, even if it’s a small one. In a romance, for example, you’re probably going to have character arcs for both love interests. You might also see multiple of these conflicts play out in a bildungsroman. You begin this plot thread with a character’s identity crisis, and you end when that identity crisis is resolved. Think “internal conflict.”
E is for Event
The most common description for the event is a disruption of the status quo, or something going wrong. You begin this plot thread with an upset, and you end it with that upset getting resolved one way or another. This is the priceless, prized heirloom locket snapping in two hours before the bride is set to wear it in her wedding, and the locket is either going to get fixed or stay broken by the end of the plot thread.
I, personally, prefer to think of E as External—as in, external conflict—rather than Event, even though Milieu and Inquiry are also external conflict.
How to Use the MICE Quotient to Determine the Length of Your Project
In a lecture on short stories, Mary Robinette Kowal gave her equation for calculating approximate word counts. You can watch that lecture here (and it’s definitely worth the watch!), but I’m going to include the equation as she gave it below.
As is true for almost all things (except, ironically, math), this is not going to give you exact numbers, but it’s great for estimating and predicting.
Now, I have the great privilege of having a father who has a Master’s degree in mathematics and a brother who’s an engineer, so after triple-checking my work, we came to the conclusion that the same L answer can be calculated using the following equation (using the same variables above):
L = 500(C+S) • M
Kowal uses the non-simplified version of the equation to better illustrate where those numbers are coming from. The 750 in the original equation is the average between 500 and 1,000, which is the range of words Kowal says you need to do a character or setting justice in a story. But if you use the simplified version of the equation, I won’t tell anybody.
Ready to calculate your novel’s MICE quotient? You’ll have plenty of space to do that in your 90-Day Novel Planner!
You can do that with our 90-Day Novel Planner, featuring weekly and daily planning pages and space for notes about characters, plot threads, and whatever else you need to keep track of while you get the book done.
