Still Brainstorming Story Tags

Been stuck on tagging all of last week and this week. Starting to realize it’s not as simple as DSR and PROG tags. PROG has to be broken up into FOUR different tag categories: QST (quests), NTW (network), INQ (inquiries), and ARC (character arcs).

As you’ll soon see, these four tag categories are heavily influenced by OSC’s MICE quotient, and MRK’s revised version of it… but I’m trying to make it more functional and useful to me and the way my brain processes it, which unfortunately, doesn’t give me a memorable acronym like MICE. But let’s go through them…

Quests [QST]

QST, or “Quests”, are the action beats that drive a story. Unless it’s an action film where one action defines the entire story, it is a series of them in a longer work (film/novel), but perhaps only one in a short story. It’s akin to EVENT in the MICE quotient, but more clear, specific, and functional to me. It tells me what the PROT has to do.

Here’s what I have so far…

I don’t know if this is exhaustive in terms of pure actions, but it feels fairly exhaustive to me. QSTs are straight-up “go do x” tasks. It might run into conflict, obstacles, opposition, constraints, or traps, but it’s not “baked in” if that makes sense. I think 90% of everyday tasks in the real world just happen routinely.

However, it should be noted that if the story doesn’t make a big deal of it, if it doesn’t dramatize it, nor is the action itself load-bearing, and you can handwave it, that is – skip the parts where you’re going from location A to location B, then it is NOT a QST sequence.

Network [NTW]

NTW, or “Network”, is the social network in which the characters live. This is one of my biggest “breakthroughs” on story construction, at least theoretically. It’s sorta like milieu in the MICE quotient, but again, I’m re-tagging everything because I found the original OSC definition of it lacking. MRK uses “milieu” to dictate the action as going to a place and getting out, or choosing to stay, or whatever. It’s clearly “place”. But I reviewed my old 1988 OSC notes. It states: “in [their] travels [they] reveal the attitude and expectations of the cultural ambience through his eyes.”1

So in the 1988 book, Character and Viewpoint), OSC hints at the “cultural ambience”. I’m taking this one level deeper to talk about the social fabric and cultural norms which our characters are woven into and how we struggle against it. For me, NTW is about power dynamics, the individual versus the group, how we prey on each other, the hierarchy, the system, loyalty to, or rebelling against the rules. And there are clear PROGs here too. It might have a lot of little QSTs to drive the story forward, but there’s a clear arc from A to B. I’ve also noticed that NTW shows up as the “reason why” at the end of a lot of PURE QST stories. At the end of Snowpiercer (2013) which is a qst: GO SEE quest (Get to the front of the train, they don’t really know why or how they’ll rebel, but they just know they need to get to the front…), and recently for me, Never Let Me Go (2005), which in the third act is a qst: ASK quest (go ask Madame about a deferral and the art gallery)… the person in power reveals the NTW the characters never saw.

NTW, for me then, isn’t just milieu so much as the power structure, the infrastructure and institutions, and the hierarchy we deal with every day. It could be a close knit group of friends, again, like Never Let Me Go where Kath, Ruth, and Tommy have a love triangle… to all the different predator/prey relationships in Cloud Atlas (2004), to two warring families in Romeo and Juliet (1597)… to epic, galaxy-spanning factions in Dune (1965), or even multiverse-hopping worlds of the MCU. The key for me here are RELATIONSHIPS and the inherent POWER DYNAMIC between people in relationships. Even in a marriage, there may be someone who settled, or someone who married above their station, or someone who’s put on a pedestal. Someone has power, somebody else is disempowered, exploited, or taken advantaged of. The wider the power dynamic, the greater the social conflict. Here’s what I have in order of having power to not, to actively working against it…

Character Arcs [ARC]

The character arc is a little more difficult to suss out. Most websites talk about the ascending, flat, and descending arc… which like The Hero’s Journey is simply not functional and useful. It’s too abstracted to actually use as elements to build a story. What helped me figure this out better is MRK’s arc acronym of DREAM (Denial, Reluctance, Exploration, Acceptance, Manifestation). If we start there, then all ARCs are essentially a denial first, and with that… we can actually build scenes and sequences from that starting point (which is functional and useful for constructing a story).

As with the two above tag groups, I’m trying to essentialize “types” as much as I can without losing usefulness. That’s important. If it gets too abstracted like, again, The Hero’s Journey, to keep beating a dead horse… then it becomes useless. So if we start with say, a table of common denial-acceptance pairs, it might look something like this:

DenialMisbehaviorAcceptance
“I don’t know anything, but I want X”Naive Fool“I have a lot to learn”
“I need to prove myself”Chipped Shoulder“I am enough.”
“I can do it myself, I can do it ALL”Invincible Ego“I’m human and I need boundaries”
“I don’t need other people”Lone Wolf“I need my found family”
“I’m fine. EVERYTHING is FINE!”Bad Coping“Everything isn’t fine. I need to change”
“I’m doing this for X (noble reason)”Bad Excuse“Actually, I’m doing this for selfish reasons”
“The sacrifice is worth it for the greater good”Blind Loyalty“Actually, we’re hurting people”
“I must be/do/have X, it’s who I am!”Holding On“I’m not defined by X, and it’s OK”

Inquiry [INQ]

OK, so now we’re at the only MICE quotient letter I didn’t change, since MRK already did from OSC. Originally, it was “Idea”, and OSC wrote: “Idea is about a PROBLEM or question posed to main character and audience. The answer is revealed at the end.” MRK didn’t change the meaning of it, but did label it way more clearer. It’s an inquiry. Or put even more clearly, it’s a mystery. And the beats of a mystery are always nearly the same:

  1. Be presented with a mystery (the what)
  2. Gather, find, or stumble on to clues
  3. Go to crime scenes (if actual procedural)
  4. Interview leads and suspects
  5. Figure out network of relationships
  6. Narrow down H4W (who, when, where, why, how) until you solve it.

And to be clear - mysteries don’t have to be a crime (murder, kidnapping, theft) that you solve. Obviously that’s a whole genre in and of itself. But you can weave “inquiry threads” into the fabric of your story, or make it the entire overarching story. As MRK pointed out before, Pride and Prejudice (1813) is a mystery. Who the hell is Darcy and why is he such a jerk? Get clues, get more clues, get proposed to (what?!), get a letter explaining why he hates Wickham… and then more mysterious behavior like helping out Lydia, but also showing up at the wedding. Dude just doesn’t conform to the norm.

So here are some inquiry questions I think expands what an INQ is beyond just crime.

And if I had to break it down into categorical tags… and put it into some sort of order, I suppose I could order it from least “ignorable” to something the POV has to pay attention to?

I think a good stress test for all these questions is if they fit into the six-point plot above for mysteries. Or even simpler, do they need to get clues, talk to leads, figure out relationships, and answer the question.

OK, I think I’m done here. This has eaten up two weeks of my life.

  1. Re-reading this and realizing I subconsciously update all my notes to the gender neutral pronoun, but it’s especially of note here, because… OSC. ↩︎