Categories
Narration Story Structure

Inciting incident: Definition, tips and examples

In writing fiction, the opening events that set your story in motion are pivotal. They set the tone and mood, establish key details of character and setting (time and place), and build intrigue. Read a full definition of the inciting incident and tips and examples for making your own gripping:

In writing fiction, the opening events that set your story in motion are pivotal. They set the tone and mood, establish key details of character and setting (time and place), and build intrigue. Read a full definition of the inciting incident and tips and examples for making your own gripping:

Inciting incident: A definition

The inciting incident is an episode, plot point or event that hooks the reader into the story. This particular moment is when an event thrusts the protagonist into the main action of the story. Screenwriting guru Syd Field describes it as ‘setting the story in motion’.

The inciting incident also fits Joseph Campbell’s description of the ‘hero’s journey’. In a study on many myths and folk tales, Campbell observed similar incidents in many myths. Campbell’s term for the inciting incident is the ‘call to adventure’.

Inciting incident examples include the moment when Katniss Everdeen’s sister’s name is drawn and she decides to take her place in Suzanne Collins’ 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.

So how do you create a compelling inciting incident?

1. Give your inciting incident urgency

Time is a crucial element of setting and plot because the ‘when’ of the story can add tension or constraint, yielding a greater need for development and/or resolution.

Take, for example, a romantic novel in which two characters meet in a seaside tourist town. Compare these two hypothetical openings:

‘She had arrived that morning. The narrow stairs to her hotel room were barely wide enough for her luggage. Bumping her bag up the crumbling concrete she was watching each step when she noticed a man’s watch lying beneath the railing.’

Let’s say the watch belongs to a future lover, and the woman’s discovery leads to their first encounter. If the same extract began ‘She had only four days to explore the city’, this time constraint would create immediate urgency. There would be a constraint on finding the item’s owner and any ensuing relationship.

The time factor makes finding the item (the inciting incident) and returning it to its owner (the key incident, the story-developing meeting) that much more urgent and compelling.

2. Raise questions for your reader

A great inciting incident leaves us with questions we want answered. For example, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, we read this opening:

‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.’

The opening is effective because it gives us not one but two inciting events, in different time periods. We are given:

  1. A future event: A main character will face the death penalty.
  2. A past event significant enough for the character to remember it in this future moment (the trip with his father).

As a result, we have questions about both incidents we want answered. Why will the Colonel be given the death penalty? What was significant about that day with his father? Marquez thus sets up multiple story arcs with rich potential for discovery in a single paragraph.

Now Novel writer

Brainstorm a strong inciting incident

Brainstorm your story’s central idea and inciting incidents you can develop.

START

3. Use your inciting incident to illustrate key aspects of character(s)

The inciting incident in a novel is a good point to begin illustrating key facts about characters. How your character reacts to the inciting event gives us an idea of their personality, their values, goals, strengths or weaknesses.

For example, the opening line of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway immediately begins filling in character:

‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’

The action (buying the flowers) is relevant to a key event. A party Clarissa Dalloway will hold at her home. The fact that she’ll ‘buy the flowers herself’ suggests multiple character details:

  • Clarissa is hands-on, practical, take-charge
  • She doesn’t necessarily have to do things herself. It implies she has people in her employ who can do menial tasks for her. It suggests her class status

We thus get a glimpse of the character – her class status along with her decisive, active nature, both of which Woolf continues to illustrate. We know the flowers are for some purpose, but not what. Although this event isn’t a gripping hook, it subtly leads us to wonder about this character.

Inciting incident quote - Donald Miller | Now Novel

4. Set the tone for your story

The best inciting incidents set the story’s tone. They give us indications of mood, atmosphere. In Stephen King’s psychological horror Cujo, for example, a family moves to King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, where they are terrorized by the family dog who goes rabid.

King opens his novel by describing the history of a killer named Frank Dodd who terrorized the locals:

‘Once upon a time, not so long ago, a monster came to the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. He killed a waitress named Alma Frechette in 1970; a woman named Pauline Toothaker and a junior high school student […]’

King describes how Frank Dodd took his life, and moves from this backstory to describing Castle Rock in 1980, ten years later. The Trenton’s four year old awakens to find a creature in his room:

‘He pulled the covers up, and that was when he saw the creature in his closet.
Low to the ground it was, with huge shoulders bulking above its cocked head […]’

Through his backstory and inciting incident (the reappearance of ‘The Monster’ in a different guise), King creates a sense of menace. We wonder about the linkage between the Frank Dodd backstory and Tad Trenton’s inciting incident.

King’s narration is maybe a little obvious. Even so, we have a clear sense of multi-generational malevolence haunting Castle Rock from the inciting incident on.

5. Know where in the story your inciting incident occurs

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. It might meander aimlessly.

If you find that what you think of as the inciting moment falls later in the story, examine your first act (i.e. your first 3 or so chapters) 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. Is there none? You need to rework the first act of your novel so you establish key points of cause and effect sooner.

An inciting incident can happen almost anywhere in the first act. 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.

Cynthia Ozick on inciting incidents | Now Novel

6. Develop your inciting incident

Now that you understand the inciting incident definition and have read some examples, let’s examine 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 (a letter, a visit, an encounter)

Say you have your inciting incident already [if not, join Now Novel to brainstorm your story’s Central Idea]. Maybe your main character makes a grisly discovery, or has a love-at-first-sight encounter. What might happen as a result of this incident?

Brainstorm possible trajectories for your story. Ask yourself:

  • How could the inciting incident affect characters? Is their response fear and the need for survival (like King’s four-year-old character Tad in Cujo), desire, or another emotion?
  • What additional questions may the reader have as a result of it? For example (to use the first example), ‘to whom does the watch belong and why was it lying in the stairwell?’
  • What tensions or conflicts might arise from the inciting incident, creating additional drama and contrast?

Ask step-by-step story questions to methodically chart a course for your book now.

Cover source image by Nathan McBride

By Jordan

Jordan is a writer, editor, community manager and product developer. He received his BA Honours in English Literature and his undergraduate in English Literature and Music from the University of Cape Town.

18 replies on “Inciting incident: Definition, tips and examples”

It’s interesting to think about “inciting incidents” when I’m around the 50,000 word mark with my manuscript. It puts my brain into editing gear to ask these questions like, “is the start of my story good enough?” For as long as I’ve been writing, I use the prologue as a way to create the inciting incident but then after that, I feel as if I my stories take a very long time to pick up pace. I’m one of those writers who like multiple main characters so it takes awhile to give them a good introduction. I am also writing in the fantasy genre so I feel as if I can take my time. Do you think genre makes a difference to the inciting incident? I think remembering to include all of these elements mentioned here—urgency, setting, character introduction, and questions to the reading—is really the key but I think it’s harder than it seems! Thank you so much for this helpful piece. I think it’s time I revisit my first few pages…

Hi there – thank you for this interesting question.

Prologues are often great for world-building and showing in miniature what the key themes, geographies or other elements of your world are. Starting with a character action that elicits strong questions in the reader is often a good idea. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ the boy protagonist’s aunt discovers his magical ability and this sets in motion his training. We wonder what challenges and obstacles he’ll face and overcome, given how ‘new’ this experience is.

I hope revisiting your first pages proves a fun, inspiring exercise.

Thank you for encouraging me to keep using prologues! They are very useful to add a cliffhanger which will be answered later on in the story. Thank you for the advice as well, I’ll definitely be checking to ensure I have good hooks with my characters and their actions.

Yes, it has already been so exciting. Reading through them is like remembering what made me love the story in the first place.

My Inciting event features my MC finding a space craft which crash landed in an orange grove. It happens near the end of chapter one.

I believe you’re incorrect with your Star Wars example. Luke receiving the message sparked an interest but it was the killing of his aunt and uncle that forced him to accept the call to action. In The Wizard of Oz, it’s not the cyclone but Toto returning home and Dorothy deciding to run away. The I. I. must present a dilemma for the protagonist. I do agree with your Hunger Games example.

Hi Spencer, thank you for your interesting question. I would say not necessarily, since it depends whose POV begins the story. The other mains might enter due to the action and reaction beats stemming from the initial inciting incident that gets the first main character’s story going. They would however all need goals and motivations (reasons to be involved in the story that you know in the background but might reveal at different points in the narrative). The key is to make each character’s involvement purposeful, contribute something to the story as a whole. I hope this is helpful.

I am struggling a bit here. My historical novel begins with a prologue that includes conflict and a cliffhanger. With chapter 1, I go into a flashback throughout several chapters to establish character and world, and then return to the main story (the one from the prologue) around chapter 6, with an inciting incident officially happening around the 100-page mark. This incident is the one that triggers the story seen in the prologue, but since it is happening so late – to leave room for world building and character setup – I am not sure it works out.

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Eric

Hi Eric, thank you for sharing this interesting information about the structure of your historical novel.

The format of the prologue sounds good. Several chapters of flashback does sound perhaps a little questionable – the 100-page mark is definitely further in than usual for an inciting incident for the presently unfolding part of the story (the most recent or current part in relation to flashbacks and other preceding/context-giving elements).

My suggestion would be to cut up the backstory and intersperse these flashbacks between unfolding events in the ‘post-inciting-incident’ timeline.

This would make sense also in terms of how flashbacks/PTSD work, in the sense that they don’t tend to all occur in an expository lump but rather as specific triggers cause specific memories or experiences to be recalled (so an added advantage of this choice is that it could create a stronger sense of psychological realism, if there is an element of trauma to what your character/s has/have gone through). Even regular, non-traumatic memory may be piecemeal this way (at least for the sake of avoiding any expository lumps).

I hope this is helpful! If you have not finished your draft yet, I’d suggest completing it and then going back to redistribute the exposition so the inciting incident occurs earlier, establishing its narrative suspense and significance sooner. Good luck!

Thanks, Jordan.

The draft is finished and I have been working on revisions for several weeks, but I keep stumbling over the initial chapters, as I shuffle and move sections around to see how and where they work best. The initial chapters are not structured as flashback or exposition, but rather as chronological key-snapshots of the character growing up. The prologue serves as a kind of “teaser” to show the reader where the story is going, a scene that takes place shortly beore one of the major conflicts later on, but from a different POV. Then, it starts with childhood (3 chapters), and character in her early twenties (2 chapters), mainly for character backstory and world-building (Pre-Independence South America), before resuming with the adult character and the main story thread, with the inciting incident a bit later which then triggers her journey. I tried to take my time with the world-building and character past and PTSD to let the reader find into the world first, especially because of when and where it takes place, before the story gets rolling. But despite the dynamic prologue, I am a bit concerned that I might be testing the reader’s patience the way it’s currently set up.

I will keep tweaking. Thanks again for your thoughts and ideas. 🙂

Best,
Eric

Eric, sounds like you could benefit from ‘The English Patient’, both the movie, and the book. As far as the beginning and the ending go, I liked the movie version better.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *