Inciting Incident

http://www.nownovel.com/blog/inciting-incident/

The Inciting Incident

By STEVEN PRESSFIELD | Published: FEBRUARY 2, 2011

http://www.stevenpressfield.com/2011/02/the-inciting-incident/

I’m on the road this week, visiting Robert McKee in Sedona, AZ. It’s his birthday. Bob McKee, if you don’t know him, is the guru of screenwriters and the founding force behind Storylogue on the web. His intensive story workshops, which he gives all around the world, are like four years of writer’s college in 96 hours.

McKee

Robert McKee during his four-day Story workshop

I’ve taken his course three times. The thing I say about Bob (and it’s absolutely true) is that he’s not just the best teacher of writing I’ve every known, but the best teacher of anything. If you saw the movie Adaptation, starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep and Chris Cooper and written by Charlie Kaufmann, you know the profane, bombastic and passionately pro-writer character “Robert McKee,” as acted by Brian Cox. That’s pretty close to reality.

When I praise McKee, I sometimes get asked skeptically, “If he’s so great, what specifically did you learn from him” Here’s one concept of many: the Inciting Incident.

What is the Inciting Incident?

The inciting incident in a screenplay or novel is that event that gets the story rolling. In The Hangover, it’s the moment when the guys wake up in their trashed villa with no memory of what happened the night before–and realize that they’ve lost their friend Doug. With that, the story kicks into gear. Everything before that is just setup.

The inciting incident comes in the First Act. If it’s in a screenplay, it occurs sometime before page 28. Some inciting incidents come right up front. True Grit starts the minute Mattie gets it into her head to hire Rooster Cogburn to go after the man who killed her father—and to ride along with him herself. (A case might be made that the inciting incident doesn’t come till Rooster agrees to go, but in my view Mattie’s will is so strong that we in the audience know she’s going to get Rooster whether he likes it or not.)

In other stories, like the first Rocky, the inciting incident comes late. There, it’s not till Apollo Creed decides to give an unknown fighter a shot at him (and picks “the Italian Stallion” out of the handbook of professional boxers) that the movie really gets rolling. Before that, we’ve had a detailed setup—establishing Rocky, Adrian, Pauly; the fact that Rocky thinks of himself as a bum and so does everyone in his Philadelphia neighborhood; that he’s out of shape, going nowhere; he’s a bone-breaker for a small-time hood; but also that his personality is like Ferdinand the bull—he’s got the strength to take on the champ, but he also has a kind and empathetic heart.

The story dictates when the inciting incident will come. Some tales need more setup up front than others. (Once the story starts, we can’t slow down for more setup.)

All projects have inciting incidents (or should)

The concept of the inciting incident can be applied to all kinds of stuff other than stories. The inciting incident of the iPhone is all the smart tricks it can do. Before that, the iPhone was just a phone. It was vanilla; it was generic. The iPhone’s story kicks in with the apps. Now we’ve got traction. Now we’re rolling.

There’s an inciting incident in this post. It’s at the end of the second paragraph, start of the third. What comes before is setup.

Your new restaurant has an inciting incident. It comes when diners walk in the door, or partway down the menu, or somewhere in the first course of a meal. Your ballet has an inciting incident; so does software project, your rock CD, your youth center in the slums of Sao Paulo.

Before I took Robert McKee’s course, I had never heard the term “inciting incident.” I had already written a dozen screenplays and there was an inciting incident in all of them. But I had done it entirely on instinct; I had no concept to apply consciously. Realizing that there was such a thing as an inciting incident (and understanding its purpose and placement) gave me a check to apply to any story or any project I was working on.

A great inciting incident

One of the all-time best inciting incidents is in the movie Chinatown. Do you remember how the story starts? Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray (Diane Ladd) hires private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) to tail her husband. She suspects the old man is having an affair with a younger woman. Sure enough, Nicholson snoops around and takes photos of Hollis Mulwary with a “cute little twist,” as Robert Towne’s screenplay phrases it. Somehow this hits the newspapers. A scandal erupts. (But the movie story still hasn’t started; it needs one more turn.

Nicholson is in his office when gorgeous, elegantly dressed Faye Dunaway walks in, accompanied by her attorney. “Do you know me, Mr. Gittes?” Jack smiles and acknowledges that he doesn’t. “I think I’d remember that,” he says. “Then you’ll agree,” continues Faye, “that I didn’t hire you to follow my husband.” Jack’s smile is fading fast. Faye informs him that her name is Mrs. Hollis Mulwray. Whoever hired Jack was an impostor. And she—the real Mrs. Mulwray–is going to sue Jack for all he’s worth.

JAKE GITTES

There’s no need to get tough, Mrs. Mulwray.

EVELYN MULWRAY

I don’t get tough, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does.

And she turns on her lovely heel and exits.

What’s your inciting incident?

A great inciting incident makes us readers/audience members flash back mentally to what came before—and realize that everything we thought we understood is false. There’s more going on, we realize, than meets the eye. That’s fun, isn’t it?

Ask yourself of your project, “What is the inciting incident?” “When does the ‘story’ take off?” You’d be surprised how many would-be novels/screenplays/restaurants/startups don’t have inciting incidents. That’s why they don’t work.

Next week we’ll talk about the relationship of inciting incident to theme. And what this phrase means: “The inciting incident sets up the Obligatory Scene.”

I got this all from Robert McKee.

An inciting incident definition:

The inciting incident is an episode, plot point or event that hooks the reader into the story. Screenwriting guru Syd Field wrote about the inciting incident in his classic book Screenplay. The inciting incident also fits Carl Jung’s description of the ‘hero’s journey’. In an examination of myths and stories from all over the world, Jung observed similar structural incidents. In Jung’s version, the inciting incident is named the ‘call to adventure’. This particular moment is when an event thrusts the protagonist into the main action of the story.

Inciting incident examples include the moment when Katniss Everdeen’s sister’s name is drawn and she decides to take her place in The Hunger Games. Another example is the moment Dorothy is picked up by a cyclone in The Wizard of Oz and the moment when Luke Skywalker receives Princess Leia’s message in Star Wars. In romance novels and movies, an inciting event is nearly always the moment that the couple-to-be meets for the first time.

Asking these questions about the crucial event that launches your story can pinpoint potential structural problems in your novel to avoid:

When Does it Happen?

The three-act structure for storytelling divides a story into acts of different lengths. The first and third act are each about 25 percent of the story while the second act comprises the middle 50 percent. In other words, in a 400-page novel, the first act – if this structure is used – is roughly the first 100 pages.

The inciting incident has to take place in the first act. This is non-negotiable: it is the catalyst that sets the rest of your story in motion. If it does not occur in the first act, your story might be structurally confusing.

If you find that what you think of as the inciting moment falls later in the story, take a look back at your first act and see if you can identify an inciting event there. If you do find one, you need to stop and consider which story you want to tell and which inciting incident you want to work from. If you do not find one, you need to rework the first act of your novel.

An inciting incident can happen almost anywhere in the first act, but for the most part, sooner is better than later. An early instance gets the attention of your readers and creates a narrative drive that makes them want to read more.

Who Does it Happen To?

The inciting incident happens to the protagonist. This may seem like an obvious observation, but just as looking at when the event happens can help you see plot and structure. This helps you examine problems with character or plot.

You may take a look at your outline or what you have written so far and find that the inciting event happens to someone other than your protagonist. If this is the case, here are a few questions you need to ask yourself to get to the bottom of things:

• Do you know who your protagonist is? This may seem like an obvious question, but it is not unusual to start a novel and realise that you are telling the wrong person’s story. Ideally the protagonist needs to have the most at stake in the story. If you have chosen a protagonist who is unaffected by inciting incident does not happen and who has less at stake than another character, you may need to rethink your choices.
• Two of the most famous examples come from 19th century literature. In the novelWuthering Heights, the narrators are a housekeeper and one of Heathcliff’s tenants, but Heathcliff is the protagonist. The Sherlock Holmes stories are narrated by Dr. Watson, but Sherlock is the protagonist. In both cases, the narrators seem more human and less forbidding than the protagonists they describe; it would be difficult for a reader to identify with either Sherlock or Heathcliff. In the case of Wuthering Heights, it also adds an extra layer to the story because the narrators may be unreliable. To bring this back to the inciting incident, you need to make sure that the incident is happening to the right person, and that you are telling the story from the right point of view. You may need to consider that these should be different people.

• Is your protagonist effectively developed? An inciting incident that happens to the wrong character may not necessarily mean that you need to scrap your plot or start writing about someone else; it may simply mean that you have not imagined your protagonist vividly enough. For some beginning writers in particular, the protagonist tends to be too passive. Even though the inciting incident is usually something that happens to the protagonist rather than being set in motion by the protagonist, if your character is thinly developed, you may find yourself giving the exciting call to adventure to someone else. This is a cue to go back and work on character development.

Developing the Inciting Incident

Now that you understand the inciting incident definition as well as when and to whom the inciting incident happens, let’s examine exactly what this story element is and how to develop it. To review, here are three points to keep in mind about the inciting incident:

• The inciting incident happens in the first act.
• The inciting incident happens to the protagonist.
• The protagonist is usually passive at this juncture; the inciting incident is generally set in motion by someone or something else.

If you are someone who tends to do a lot of planning and outlining before writing your book, you may already have the main plot in mind, and you’ll need to work back from there to decide what your inciting incident will be. Knowing the genre of your story may help. In a detective novel, the inciting incident is most likely the moment the protagonist learns of the crime.

If you tend to enjoy making things up as you go along, or if you are starting your novel or outline without a clear plot in mind, the inciting incident can give you both the momentum and the inspiration you need. Create an intriguing inciting incident and then brainstorm from there. What might happen as a result of this incident?

If you have written about 15,000 words of your novel or around 60 pages – the actual numbers will vary depending on the final length of your book – and are finding yourself bogged down, you may be lacking an inciting incident. If you are writing without a plan, you need to come up with an inciting incident and write it into the first act. If you are writing with a plan, take a look at your plot and think about what will set the action of the story in motion.

One thing to keep in mind is that not everyone agrees about what the inciting incident is in any particular book or movie. Some people also argue that the inciting incident is different from the call to adventure. This makes the process of structuring a story seem less a science than an art, and in fact, it is. Keep in mind that in your story, you have the final word as to what constitutes the inciting incident, and don’t get too bogged down in others’ disputes about identifying the precise incident in works by other people.

The inciting incident is a necessary structural development and is the moment from which everything else that happens will grow. Examining the inciting incident in your work can also point to weaknesses in character, story and pace. If the first part of your story feels slow, you may have a missing or ineffective inciting incident.

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