James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Among writing instructors you’ll often hear the term “inciting incident.” It’s become part of the craft jargon. But not with me. In fact, I think I’ve only used it once or twice in the past, and then only to make some minor point about something else.
Now it’s time to dump it completely.
For starters, no one agrees on a definition. Is it the “action that starts the story” or the “Call to Adventure”? Is it the scene that “kicks the story into motion”? And if it is, what is all that stuff BEFORE the “inciting incident”? Stuff that DOESN’T kick the story into motion? Every scene in your book or movie better incite SOMETHING or it shouldn’t be there.
Is it an “event that forces the hero to react”? But there are many events that force reaction in a novel. If there aren’t, you’ve got a four-letter novel, spelled d-u-l-l.
Is the “inciting incident” supposed to happen near the opening of the novel? Or is it the break into Act 2? You’ll find it taught both ways.
Does the inciting incident “upset the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life”?
Well, if it does, how come it’s only one incident? There are lots of incidents in a story that upset the “balance of forces.”
Look at The Wizard of Oz. Miss Gulch takes Toto away. Dorothy gets him back and runs away. A twister hits and carries her to Oz. She meets a bunch of Munchkins and a good witch who looks like a soap bubble. She’s confronted by the Wicked Witch and threatened with death. Then she’s given the ruby slippers and told to follow the yellow brick road. She meets three odd allies, is peppered with apples by angry trees, gets intimidated by the Great Oz, gets carried away by flying monkeys and imprisoned, disposes of the Wicked Witch, gets cheated by Oz (until Toto reveals the man behind the curtain) and ends up back in black and white Kansas.
All of those incidents “upset the balance of forces.”
So instead of worrying about what an “inciting incident” means and where it goes, try it this way: You open with a disturbance. That’s change or challenge, anything that puts a ripple in the Lead’s ordinary life.
How does The Wizard of Oz start? Not with a rainbow, or birds singing, or Dorothy waking up happy. No. The first shot is her running down the road, afraid of Miss Gulch coming after Toto.
Then we get to the Act 1 break. This I call the Doorway of No Return. It’s got to force the Lead through and slam shut. That’s what Act 2 has to feel like. The Lead is in trouble and has to solve it. She can’t go running back to the placid world where she came from.
The twister in Oz does that to Dorothy. The murder of his Aunt and Uncle does that to Luke Skywalker. Life will never be the same for them. It happens to Astrid Magnussen in Janet Fitch’s White Oleander when her mother is imprisoned and Astrid is forced into the foster home system. The door has slammed shut. Literally, she can’t go home again.
Now some writers have these ideas right in their DNA and do these things instinctively. Others have to learn how to do them. Still others, even published authors, could strengthen their books by giving these craft points some study.
I urge all writers to keep up a study of the craft. Would you want your brain surgery to be done by a doctor who is reading the medical journals and constantly trying to improve? Or the one who has just returned from a year long vacation in Barbados, where he did nothing but lounge on the beach sipping Piña Coladas?
Writing is like brain surgery, except nobody dies when you make a mistake. Readers might get bored, though, if you don’t know how to disturb and then push through the Doorway of No Return.
And, on every page, incite something.