The Good Seed IV
By Donald Maass | July 4, 2012 |
What changed your life?
If not for a certain person, event, tragedy or triumph, you’d be coasting along through life, content with your job in benefits administration, trimming your lawn, living for the weekend and never missing an episode of “Community”. But that’s not you. You’re on a unique path. Your purpose in life is higher. Why? Something or someone shaped you.
That’s true of stories, too. A strong story can be shaped by someone or something in the story itself. It takes the path it takes because a character gives it a shove, or something occurs that imposes on your characters the necessity of change.
That shove or provocation is the story’s inciting incident. When such an incident is present a story doesn’t gradually gather velocity, it bursts from the starting blocks at high speed. When a character fires a provocative shot it doesn’t simply startle folks standing nearby, it ignites a war. Packing more into an inciting incident is the fourth way of developing your premise. It’s a seed that you genetically modify so that your story grows huge.
One way to look at inciting incidents is to see them either as something someone does, or something that’s done unto your characters. It might be an opportunity that opens up, a mystery that arises, an injury made fresh, the arrival of a stranger, or anything else. What’s important is that whatever occurs is enormous in its implications and that it stirs up inescapable trouble.
Here are some ways to develop your inciting incident:
- Who can say or do something to your protagonist that gives them great pain, hope, responsibility or fear? Work on it until it has the maximum effect. Time it to be highly disruptive. Make it impossible to avoid.
- What would make the inciting action one precisely calibrated to hit your protagonist where he or she is the most vulnerable? What makes it especially personal, painful, seductive or emotional? Make it more so.
- If there’s an inciting incident, list for your principle characters the way in which it will hurt, harm, pry open, challenge or change each one.
- How will the initial event set your characters against each other? How will it ignite conflict? Work until those conflicts are stark and irresolvable.
- Find in the inciting event that which would rile up anyone. Magnify and elaborate that element. Poke your readers in their eyes. Make them defensive. Make them mad. Make them think.
A well-constructed inciting incident will stir up your readers but leave them with no idea what they would do. To resolve their inner unbalance, they’ll have to find out what your protagonist will do. Whatever that is, it won’t be easy because what you’ve sewn is a garden of conflict. That’s good. You want your premise to grow into plenty of story.
Photo courtesy Flickr’s Leshaines123
Donald Maass (he/him) founded the Donald Maass Literary Agency. in New York in 1980. He is the author of The Career Novelist (1996), Writing the Breakout Novel (2001), Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook (2004), The Fire in Fiction (2009), The Breakout Novelist (2011), Writing 21st Century Fiction (2012) and The Emotional Craft of Fiction (2019). He has presented hundreds of workshops around the world and is a past president of the American Association of Literary Agents (formerly AAR).
I recently changed my inciting incident. For years it had been one thing, and no one questioned that it was the right place for the story to start. But when my new editor took issue with the premise of the story, another inciting incident occurred to me–something that pushed everything back by several months. It was the right thing to do, so much so that I wonder now how I could’ve missed choosing that premise over the other.
That’s tricky, isn’t it? But guess what? The new inciting incident is the thing that changed the main characters’ lives most profoundly and at the core. The old inciting incident is what kicked off the physical journey that makes up the book–which would never have happened without the other.
Isn’t that the BEST, Therese? When doing those hard revisions makes the book so much better? Bless those tough-but-great editors.
I can’t wait to read it!
There you go, Therese. The power of a strong inciting incident. Thanks for sharing that.
One of the biggest challenges I had understanding what an inciting incident is that it’s often described a really big, in your face event like bomb exploding. That made me try to start with a major disaster, because that seemed like it was big enough. It took a lot of work to understand that sometimes the inciting incident is subtle, like a decision a character made — or didn’t make.
Very true, Linda, and a good point. It’s not necessarily about explosions in the street, it can be about earthquakes inside.
Thank you for this line: “Poke your readers in the eye.”
As someone who recently has started wearing contacts, that image is powerful and painful. As a writer starting Book #2, I welcome the reminder to hook the reader by making them feel just a little uncomfy.
Thank you, Donald. And, as an aside, I’ll be presenting Thursday night at the PNWA conference. I look forward to hearing you speak.
Welcome to the joys of contact lenses, Sarah. Most of the time they’re wonderful, but some mornings it’s like getting a poke in the eye.
Glad to know you’ll be at PNWA! I’m giving the Thursday night keynote, so let’s be sure to say hi.
Looking at Therese’s opening comment, I’m struck that I too moved where my book started at the advice of my editor. I moved it forward not backward. Now I also can’t imagine how I didn’t see that as the beginning. Funny how an outside pair of skilled eyes see things and then they seem so obvious, but I certainly didn’t see it before. Part of the magic of writing. A lovely back and forth with your inner imagination and wise guidance of others.
Editors don’t get enough credit. Glad you’ve got a good one.
I did the same thing for the same reason. buh-bye first 70 pages.
It is like the tree; for what we see above there is a mirror image of what we don’t below. To me, the inciting incident is all about the roots of that incident, what caused it, what it will cause, and the extrapolation to everything and everyone around it during those times. It is also interesting how a tree root can cause a foundation to crack…
Great analogy, wish I’d thought of it. I love your focus on widespread effects. People in stories experience problems differently, yet I don’t often see that delineated on the page.
I know this wasn’t the point of the post, but I just had to say that that opening paragraph describes me! I’m an administrator, I don’t have a lawn but I do have a huge ivy plant that grows up my back wall that I trim, I do live for the weekend, and I’ve watched every episode of Community twice this year!!
But, on a more serious note, this is something I never seem to get quite right. I have a project where the inciting event got moved back and moved back until I eventually ended up writing a whole new beginning HALF of the book. I’m still not sure if it’s right!
Nothing against administrators, lawns, weekends or “Community”. (Well, I do hate lawn care.) All good things. So are powerful inciting incidents. You’ll find yours, but then again I believe they can be built as well as discovered.
I’m not an administrator, but I do have a lawn and haven’t missed “Community”.
The only thing is, I don’t really know my inciting incident. Not in my first novel or whatever, but in real life. I don’t know what pushed me.
Thanks Donald! You’ve given me a lot to think about.
Inciting incidents are my favorite things to think about and plan for my novels – but sometimes I forget a few points you’ve made. Thanks for writing this article!
You make writing so much fun, really. I love the idea of creating an inciting incident that will pit characters against one another until their conflicts reach a pitch. Gives me a great idea for novel revisions — thanks!
I’m all for fun!
[…] comes from Donald Maass (@DonMaass). It’s the fourth in his series on Writer Unboxed called The Good Seed, in which he discusses story beginnings. This time he writes about the “inciting […]
I like the part about roughing up the readers:
“Poke your readers in their eyes. Make them defensive. Make them mad. Make them think.”
That’ll incite ’em.
-p.
(@Porter_Anderson on your nearest tweetmachine)
The inciting incident sets up the book in the reader’s mind – it also includes, somehow, the promised resolution. Or, more specifically, the reader is going to expect an end that wraps up the inciting incident, so that later, upon reflection, the whole book ‘fits’ – and a sense of satisfaction ensues.
There is nothing worse than reading something that was set up beautifully, and written well, only to find at the end that the pieces don’t go together.
That is a good way to check whether the inciting incident is the right one, and whether it is in the right place/time/sequence in the story.
Fortunately, we get to rewrite beginning OR end to make this happen, if it doesn’t happen organically during the writing process.
ABE-
The promise to the reader: you’re right that every opening promises a certain kind of story.
Many manuscripts disappoint becuase the ending that arrives often delivers exactly what was promised–no surprises, so suspense, no real journey.
A good goal for an inciting incident, I think, is to make it propulsive but not toward any particular outcome. Make a mess, in other words, without making it clear how (or even if) that mess will get cleaned up.
What do you think?
Promises to promises fulfilled – boring.
But an inciting incident that, when balanced by the ending, makes it all feel complete, right, inevitable – necessary.
The last response you want to your ending is: PREDICTABLE.
But you also don’t want: O, COME ON! That doesn’t fit AT ALL.
IOW, you don’t want the book thrown against the wall because the ending – and the beginning – just don’t work together.
Which is why it is necessary to finish the book before the final revision of the inciting incident.
And the inciting incident must be revised when the book is finished. (Or checked for compatibility if you’re a really great plotter.)
Donald, since Storymasters in Houston, your questions have provided the “inciting incident” to rewrite my story. I knew before I came, the conference would mark a turning point in my writing journey. Thankyou for sharing your story and your purpose to encourage others.
Suzanne-
So glad that “Story Masters” was helpful to you. I thought it was an incredible four days. Jim Bell and Chris Vogler have tremendous insights.
Thank you for this post, Donald. During a class I took with you in San Francisco a few years ago, you advised us to take an incident in the book we were working on and make it bigger, badder, better. I did so and loved what I got. I love the way you think.
Patti
I’m working on my second novel (ok, you know, really the fourth, but the second that I intend to be published) and am writing multiple main characters, each with an inciting incident of their own that leads them to the same place, which of course they view, use, perceive, differently. My task right now (and talk about timing) is to make those inciting incidents big, to have them throw the character completely off track. Whether off-track is good or bad is yet to be known, even by me.
Sometimes my head is just so damn crowded. You know, in a good way.
Sounds like what Collins did with The Hunger Games. I didn’t know what I would do, but watched Katniss to see how ‘we’ could get out of it.
[…] Writer Unboxed, agent Donald Maass defines “inciting incident” and gives it a […]