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Sunday Fun: The Inciting Incident

Some define the inciting incident as the exciting incident. Not really. The inciting incident can be exciting, but there may also be other exciting incidents in a story.

Inciting incident has a specific function. It is the first turning point. It starts the story by jolting the main character into action. Inciting incident is not a situation or a position taken in respect to certain condition.

Inciting incident needs to be an event and must be written as a scene. A warning here is warranted. Do not write it as a melodramatic scene. Write it as a dramatic scene. Dramatic scenes up the action and lower the volume of the melodrama.

Where the inciting incident scene is concerned, it is where the writer may create the main character’s initial surface problem so he or she can spring to action, and while doing that, the writer gives an inkling or foreshadows the true story problem mostly even without the reader’s becoming aware of it.

Since the true problem of the story always relates to the inner psychology of the main character, the story will have depth if the hint or foreshadowing given in the inciting incident has something to do with the main character’s inner psychology.

A writer can use the inciting incident in the opening or not, but in shorter stories or better novels, most opening scenes provide good hooks with the dramatization of the inciting incident in a fully developed scene. If that is not possible, then it is a good idea to put the inciting incident closer to the opening, or at least, inside somewhere in the first quarter of the story.