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The Mice Quotient

The MICE quotient is an assortment of books that is a bit different than simply dividing them into genres such as fiction, science fiction, mystery, etc.

Mice stands for Milieu, Idea, Character, and event.

Milieu - is the world surrounding the characters. A milieu story is simply a story of exploring a world and its culture. the world is usually a Fantasy world since ours we already know pretty well.
Idea - An idea story presents a question at the beginning of the book and answers it at the end. Usually it is a mystery or horror story.
Character - A character story explores a certain character, starting with this character trying to find a better lane for itself, and ending with it finding that lane, or getting even farther away if the case is a tragedy. Usually this is regular fiction, but sometimes Science fiction as well.
Event - The event story focuses on a single event that causes some disorder, and on the attempt to undo it. An example would be Armageddon, the day after tomorrow, all of the disaster movies.

I read this in a book called 'Characters and viewpoints' by Orson Scott Card, but this is the only link I could find - a bit clumsy but informative. Click on 'next slide' to get details about each.

Quotient Mice The

Applying this principle to the books I like is very difficult. I find it hard to determine which principle dominates, the event, or the character? I read mostly fantasy so my strain of books to pull from.

In applying the MICE quotient to other books, I find that many writers books tend to have the character to dominate. This is definently the case in almost all of Tom Clancys books. His characters always dominate his books.