Writing the Inciting Incident
Start your story off strong with an inciting incident. What is it and how do you use it? Learn more in this video, and read the transcript below.
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Writing the Inciting Incident Transcript
Hello, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. This video is about the inciting incident. I didn't say exciting incident though I think it should be exciting. I said inciting incident. So, it means to incite the action of the story. This is a term in story craft that means how you start your story. Ideally, it should be with action, I do a lot of teaching on first pages, how to dive right into story. And I strongly, strongly believe that every good story needs an inciting incident, whether that's picture book, or a super, super long fantasy novel that has a ton of backstory. You know, the old crone and the prophecy at the beginning and the prologue and all of that, I believe all of these types of manuscripts need a strong inciting incident. Now, it's important to note that inciting incident contains action, ideally, but it doesn't have to be the sort of climactic story wide plot and action of your story.
What do I mean there? So, when you think of an inciting incident, it is an incident that ideally comes in the very first few pages of your story. On a picture book, it's within the first one or two pages of your picture book, which means pretty much right away. For example, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," the mouse wants a cookie right away. And that begins sort of the problem of the story, but it happens on the first page. So, there's no need to spend a lot of time setting up the story. And that applies to every single kind of manuscript. In picture book, you just have to get to it like immediately. So, the inciting incident is a little bit of conflict. I would say it doesn't have to be a 10 out of 10 conflict. Why? Well, we don't know your character yet, we don't know your story, we don't care as readers just yet. So, if your character is running for their lives right away, readers may actually not attach to that, they may not be grippy enough because they don't yet relate to the character.
They're disoriented, they're new to the story in the world, they don't know what the character is running from, where they're running to, why they're being chased, who's chasing them, we don't know the stakes or the risks or anything like that. So, starting at a 10 out of 10 can actually be kind of a liability for you. That being said, you do wanna start with action, you do wanna start with some kind of conflict and that's where the inciting incident comes in. Donald Maass, who is a great writing teacher and literary agent, he calls it bridging conflict. And I think that's a really nice reminder that it doesn't have to be... Cat alert. It doesn't have to be a 10 out of 10 conflict, but it does have to be sort of a bridge that you take into your story. Now, an example would be if you are starting your story with a sort of an argument between two characters, maybe the argument can be over something less serious, like what to order at the cafe for lunch, rather than sort of the argument that ends the marriage in chapter three.
So, you don't necessarily again wanna start at that 10 out of 10. And I think this is a really good thing to keep in mind for all kinds of long term fiction. With picture book, you want to just dive right in there with the conflict of the story, because you don't have that much story to get through, you don't have that many pages to do it. But if you are working on a longer... Cat alert. If you're working on a longer-form fiction for an older audience, you do want to sort of introduce conflict in the first couple of pages. And it can be characters squabbling, it can be a character freaking out or stressing out about something, anything that sort of brings tension to the page. But remember, it doesn't have to be the story wide tension, it doesn't have to be 10 out of 10 tension. Now, a lot of writers they really struggle with this idea of introducing information. I like to say that information is the enemy of action and vice versa. When you are having a lot of action and everything is going and rip-roaring, you don't have time to stop and be like, "Oh, that's an orc and orcs are bad because 5,000 years ago our people got into a territory struggle and blah, blah, blah, blah," right?
You're running for your life from the orc, not in your first chapter, but this is down the road. And similarly, if you have a ton of information, it really starts to drag the pacing down, pacing is the perceived speed at which your story moves as perceived by the reader. So, it really starts to drive pacing down and you need to inject some action there sometimes forcefully because writers really like to get their world building their information they're explaining on the page. You have to inject some action so that things don't completely roll to a stop in terms of your pacing. So, information and action are in a delicate balance or ideally they should be. For your beginning for your first couple of chapters, they need to be action forward and then you can weave information in sometimes slowly, sometimes less than you would think. Give readers the bare minimum of information that they need to understand a conflict. For example, if you open a scene on a man and a woman fighting which is a good way to get some action in there, a good way to get some conflict in there. We don't really know who they are, their backstory.
It's important to note that this person is the woman's father and has just come back into her life after a long absence. So, I would absolutely get that factoid in there. But we don't necessarily need the flashback to the childhood and the flashback to how they parted ways in the first place or a backstory of the dad and kind of everything he dealt with growing up. All of that can be woven in later if this relationship is critical to the action of the story. At first, we just need some conflict on the page. Scene dialogue are great ways of introducing that, especially in your first scene in your first chapter. A lot of writers start with sort of an explanation of the story or an introduction to the story on the first pages and that's not a really good use of the first couple of pages. So, we'll see a little bit of scene, we'll see some conflict there. Maybe they're arguing about, "Well, I thought you liked bagels." "You don't even know me, dad I like toast," you know, breakfast food argument. We can get into the bigger story wide conflict in that relationship later and as we sort of roll and really get the action going, we can maybe introduce some details of, you know, "You haven't been in my life for five years," or whatever the case may be.
You can introduce short bits of information that don't slow the action down and piece of information by piece of information, we'll get there. We'll build that backstory that you think readers need to know, don't just boom, dump it all there all at once. So, the inciting incident is a very important consideration, I would say maybe at a six or seven tension level, it doesn't have to be a 10 out of 10 tension level. But something ideally related to your main conflict, or Donald Maass says that it doesn't necessarily have to be related. It's just an excuse to get some tension on the page if it's, you know, kind of that bridging conflict that bridge into the story. But if you're not currently starting with scene, if you're not currently starting with some kind of action, some kind of tension, I would really recommend thinking of an inciting incident that can pull readers and characters and sort of story into your first scene so that your first pages get off...get out of the gate with a bang. So, my name is Mary Kole, this has been a talk about the inciting incident of a story and I'm with Good Story Company. Here’s to a good story.
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