Start Each Scene With A Bang
Mastering the inciting incident of the story grid method
If you want to level up your craft and write a scene that works, you should understand how to use the five commandments of the Story Grid method: Inciting Incident, Progressive Complication/Turning Point, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. Though all the commandments are important to creating your scene, the Inciting Incident is the beat that will draw your reader in and cause them to turn the page to see what happens next.
What is the Inciting Incident?
The Inciting Incident upsets the life balance of your lead protagonist(s). It must make them uncomfortably out of sync...for good or for ill.
An Inciting Incident can be either causal or coincidental, but regardless of which type you use, the purpose of the scene’s Inciting Incident is to cause a reaction by your protagonist.
A causal Inciting Incident occurs due to an active choice being made, such as a boy joining the military, a man texting a break-up message to a girlfriend, or a faithful dog uncharacteristically killing chickens.
A coincidental Inciting Incident occurs due to an unexpected, random, or accidental event, such as a woman winning the lottery, a man picking up the wrong suitcase in a restaurant, or a deer running in front of a car.
What reactions are these Inciting Incidents causing the protagonists to do? In the first Causal example, after joining the military, the boy might decide to go AWOL rather than show up for duty according to the contract he signed. In the first Coincidental example, the woman might decide to give all of her money to a charity.
Why do you need an Inciting Incident?
Without an Inciting Incident in your scene, you most often end up with a collection of riffs that have zero emotional payoff, and the emotional payoff of the scene is what keeps readers engaged in your story. Your Inciting Incident sets the mood for the scene and makes the reader wonder how the initial problem will be resolved. And it sets the scene up for a value change which is necessary in order to make the scene work as a whole.
Being able to put words together in unique and poetic ways without anything happening that requires an action or reaction on the part of your cast of characters is not Storytelling.
Things to remember about Inciting Incidents
- Every scene should have a compelling Inciting Incident.
- Mix them up — don’t make all of your scenes have just casual Inciting Incidents or just coincidental Inciting incidents. Keep your reader guessing, put in a coincidence when they are expecting a causal and vice versa.
- Inciting Incidents upset your protagonist(s) status quo. Your protagonist is going about a normal day doing normal, predictable things and then…(insert Inciting Incident).
Spend some time with each scene. Put yourself in the reader’s seat. Ask yourself “Why do I want to continue reading?” What will excite the reader enough to finish this scene and move to the next? If you master this commandment, you are one step closer to entrancing your readers and immersing them into your writing world.
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