Inciting Incident: How to Revise an Unputdownable Beginning

Your inciting incident sets the stage for everything that follows. Here's what to revise so it can carry the story.

A great inciting incident does a lot of heavy lifting.

→ It hooks your readers, pulling them into the story.

→ And it sets up everything to come, laying the foundation for a brilliant climax your readers will love.

The beginning matters. Which means there’s a lot of pressure to get it right.

But what does right actually mean? How do you start a story well?

That’s what I’m tackling in this episode. I’m going beyond the definition of the inciting incident to share what I as an editor am looking for when I edit inciting incidents.

In other words, if you’ve written an inciting incident and aren’t sure how to tell if it works, this episode is your guide to edit it.

You’ll hear:

• How I define the inciting incident
• Where in the story the inciting incident appears (and how to tell if it’s too early or too late)
• The 7 qualities I’m watching for when I edit an inciting incident
• The 4 common inciting incident traps I see writers fall into (including one that’s really hard to spot, and yet it can tank the whole story)
• And more

Plus, I’ve gathered it all into a one-page cheat sheet you can reference every time you edit an inciting incident. Print it out and keep it in your writing space for easy access.

If you’ve ever found the advice to “make sure your story has an inciting incident” unsatisfactory, this episode is for you.

Don’t just make sure your story has an inciting incident. Use this episode to revise it until it’s good. Great. Unputdownable, even.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Get the Inciting Incident Revision Cheat Sheet: alicesudlow.com/85
• Work with me: alicesudlow.com/contact
• Ep. 27: Value Shifts: How to Craft Compelling Change in Every Story

Transcript

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A great beginning. Hooks your readers and pulls them into the story, and it sets up everything to come laying the foundation for a brilliant, surprising, yet inevitable climax that your readers will love. The beginning matters, and you know it. I'm sure you've studied all kinds of advice telling you to kick off your story with a great inciting incident. There's a lot of pressure to get it right. But knowing the beginning matters and knowing how to get it right are two vastly different things, which means that beginnings are really, really difficult. So how do you start a story? all the advice to start with an inciting incident doesn't help if you don't know what makes inciting incidents truly work. So in this episode, that's what we're tackling. I'm going beyond the definition of the inciting incident to share what I as an editor am looking for when I edit inciting incidents. In other words, if you've written inciting incidents and aren't sure how to tell if it works, this episode is your guide to edit it. Welcome to your next draft. when I was first introduced to story structure, it blew my mind. I ate it up. It transformed the way that I think about stories. It gave me tools I could actually use to edit them and craft meaningful, useful feedback. I quickly discovered that story structure alone came with limitations. I now knew, for instance, that stories needed inciting incidents, so I could come to a manuscript and ask, does it have an inciting incident? No. Add one, yes. Great. Which sure is half the battle, but what comes next? How could I evaluate that inciting incident? What made it work? What adjustments could make it stronger? What hidden weaknesses could make it fail or cause subtle cascading problems later in the story? That's the art of editing. not just knowing what needs to be on the page, but what to do with it once it's there. And that's what I'm sharing with you here, what to do with your inciting incidents. The inciting incident is the first part of my favorite story structure, the six elements of story. And because the six elements are fractal, your story will have many inciting incidents. One, to kick off the story as a whole, one at the start of every act and one at the start of every scene. So when you know what to look for and how to edit inciting incidents. You are going to get a ton of use outta that skill. With that in mind, I've put together a free cheat sheet to go with this episode. It covers all the qualities, questions, and common traps that I'll share about the inciting incident. You can print it out and keep it at hand, easy to reference as you edit. grab that cheat sheet by going to alice slo.com/ 83 Enter your email in the form there, and I'll send it right to you. And now without further ado, let's dive in. This episode is meaty. So here's our map. I'm going to share the way I define the inciting incident, where in the story the inciting incident appears. What I'm watching for as an editor when I evaluate an inciting incident and the common traps that I see writers fall into when they're writing their inciting incidents. Let's start with the definition. Here's how I define the inciting incident. Something disrupts the character's normal and kicks off the action of the story. What does that mean? Well, at the beginning of the story, before anything has happened, the world is normal. Your character is going about their life, doing the typical things they typically do. Everything is functioning as it normally goes until the inciting incident. The inciting incident is a disruption. It's something that happens to your character, something external, something they weren't expecting that interrupts the flow of their ordinary life. Now things aren't normal anymore, something's changed, and whether they like it or not, your protagonist is going to have to respond. Where in the story is the inciting incident? The inciting incident rarely happens on page one of a novel because in order to recognize something as a disruption, first we need to understand what normal is. But it always happens fairly early on within the first few chapters of a novel or within the first few paragraphs or pages of a scene. If you've made it more than 20% into a story without an inciting incident, it's probably happening too late. now what am I watching for as an editor? There are seven qualities that I'm looking for in an effective inciting incident. Let's go through them one by one first. The inciting incident is positive or negative, never neutral. The inciting incident is always a disruption, but disruptions aren't always bad. So many negative things can kick off A story. A hiker finding a dead body in the woods. A mom whose daughter gets hospitalized in a car accident, a worker getting fired from the soul sucking job that paid their bills. But inciting incidents can be positive too. A man crosses paths in a train station with a woman he lost contact with years ago. A kid gets into an elite school, perhaps even a magical school. A woman gets a promotion. In the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reed, Monique, a journalist in the early stages of her career, is offered the chance to interview famous actress Evelyn Hugo, and write an exclusive feature. It's a windfall of an invitation, a career defining opportunity, and while it's an intimidating challenge and she has to work up the nerve to accept it, it's definitely a positive inciting incident. So when I'm looking for a stories inciting incidents, I keep in mind that it might be negative or positive. The only thing it can't be is neutral. Second, the inciting incident comes from outside the character. Protagonists do not spontaneously decide to create a disruption in their lives. Stories are about change and humans resist change. We don't go looking for disruption. Disruption happens to us whether we want it to or not, and then we're forced to respond. This is true, whether the disruption is positive or negative, whether it's a tragedy or a dream come true, whether it's finding a dead body in the woods or finding an invitation to an elite opportunity, and yes, you might argue that the kid who got into the elite school applied for it, or the woman who got the promotion worked her butt off to get it. But even in those cases, the outcomes still came from outside the character. They could influence it, but they couldn't guarantee it. They didn't control it. The opportunity itself came from outside of them. When I'm examining an inciting incident, I'm checking to see did this happen to the protagonist or from them? If the disruption came from inside the character, if they just spontaneously changed their mind or took a set in action, then I know I've got a place to troubleshoot. Third. The inciting incident disrupts the character's normal. Just as the inciting incident isn't neutral, it's also not normal. It's something beyond the day-to-day, something that sticks out. And once the protagonist experiences it, they can't unexperience it. The world won't go back to what it was before the inciting incident happened. The protagonist can't return to status quo. the key here is for the reader to recognize the resonant impact of the inciting incident. We need to know what the world looked like before it happened. We need to see status quo to experience it, to soak it in. After all, your protagonist has been soaking in status quo their entire life. We need to get a taste of it too. Because once we know what normal looks like, we'll appreciate the true magnitude of the inciting incidents disruption. So when I'm evaluating an inciting incident, I'm looking for two things. What is the status quo? What does life look like for this character before everything changes, and what is the disruption? How does the inciting incident upend that world? Fourth. The inciting incident sparks the character's goal. The protagonist always emerges from the inciting incident with a goal. They just experienced a disruption that rocked their normal life. Things aren't the same as they were before. There's disorder, chaos, newness in a space where there used to be order familiarity, peace, and that disruption catalyzes a goal. The protagonist wants something. Now, they might not say out loud to the reader, I want this, although sometimes they do do that. But if you walked up to the protagonist right after the inciting incident, you grabbed them by the arm, pulled them aside and asked, what do you want? They could tell you in a heartbeat there's something they want now, something they're going after, something they're going to chase for the rest of the scene or the act or the novel. So when I'm examining an inciting incident, I ask, what's the character's goal? What is the protagonist going to pursue now as a direct result of this disruption? Fifth, the inciting incident is aligned with the genre of the story. The inciting incident of a story is genre driven. Or to put it another way, the genre of a story defines what type of event will happen in the inciting incident. Stories are about change, remember, and genre tells us what kind of change we're dealing with. Every genre has genre specific stakes. For example, in a love story, the stakes are love or hate in an action story, the stakes are life or death. In a performance story, the stakes are success or failure. In a crime story, the stakes are justice or injustice. So the inciting incidents needs to reflect those stakes. It needs to introduce the value shift that defines the genre. If the story begins with someone discovering a dead body, we're not expecting a love story. We're expecting a crime story because that inciting incident signals a shift into the realm of justice and injustice. The inciting incident tells us what kind of story we're in one caveat here. This principle applies at every level of story from the inciting incident of the entire novel to that of an act, to that of a single scene. But at the scene level, it gets a little more nuanced. After all, if every scene begins with a discovery of a dead body, your readers are going to get both confused and bored. It just wouldn't make sense. Luckily. There are two things on your side here. First, values happen on a spectrum In a crime story, the spectrum runs from perfect justice to absolute tyranny. Most scenes fall somewhere between the extremes. The inciting incident of a scene might be the discovery of a clue, which brings us closer to justice, or it might be someone throwing up an obstacle to the investigation, which takes us closer to injustice. And second, your novel probably has multiple genres, an external genre, an internal genre, and a subplot, maybe even more than one. The inciting incident of a scene could be linked to any of those genres. If all this sounds a little dense, I get it. Genre is a big topic and a lot to take in. If these terms are new to you, I recommend checking out my episode on value shifts. That's episode 27 Value Shifts, how to Create Compelling Change in Every Story, and that's linked in the show notes as well. For now, the bottom line is this. When I'm examining an inciting incident, I'm checking to see does this event align with the genre of the story? Does it establish the value at stake? Sixth, the inciting incident is aligned with the turning point and climax. I like to think of the inciting incident, turning point and climax as forming a neat little triangle. They're connected. They match, they lock together in a tidy shape. The inciting incident establishes the value at stake and kicks off the goal for the protagonist. Then the story builds to the turning point where the protagonist realizes they can't accomplish that goal in the way that they intended. Because of that, they're faced with a crisis, a do this or do that binary choice about how they're going to tackle this problem and what kind of person they're going to be. As they do, they act on that choice in the climax, which pays off the value shift and genre expectations that were set in the inciting incidents. I'll admit that's like seven points, which is a lot for a triangle. The point though is that the inciting incident does not exist in isolation. It's structurally and emotionally connected to all the other major moments in the story. The inciting discovery of the dead body will build to the climactic exposure of the criminal. The inciting levers meet will lead to the climactic proof of love. The promise made at the inciting incident must be fulfilled by the climax. They're speaking to each other across the entire story. So when I'm examining the inciting incidents, I'm checking to see is this aligned with the rest of the story? Does it connect to all the elements of story and the fundamentals of the genre, the turning point, crisis, climax resolution, the goal, and the value at stake? And finally, seventh, the inciting incident reinforces the beginning value. Stories are about change. It's my constant refrain. If you've listened to more than one episode of this podcast, you've heard me say this before, probably a dozen times. Stories are about change. Things start one way and they end another way, and that change is the value shift. There's a beginning value and an ending value, and the story of how we got from one to the other. The inciting incident is your chance to establish the beginning value to plant a flag in the ground that says, here's where we're starting. At the beginning of Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennett is single and in a precarious financial situation. Then she meets wealthy, Mr. Darcy, he insults her and suddenly she's single in a precarious financial situation and on mutually bad terms, with one of the most eligible bachelors in the area, we're making the starting values really clear. Her singleness, her financial need, and her dislike of the eligible men around. Now an important note on scope. I want to be clear here. When I say beginning value, I'm referring to the beginning value of the section of story you're measuring. In that example of Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, I'm referring to the novel as a whole. At the end of the story, she's going to be engaged, wealthy, and in love with Mr. Darcy. When we zoom into the act or the scene, we'll find a smaller arc with its own beginning and ending values. Take for instance, the scene in which Elizabeth and Darcy meet. the inciting incident of that scene is the arrival of the Maritan Ball, where the Bennett girls will finally have the chance to meet the eligible Mr. Bingley and the fren he's brought to town. The beginning values here are optimism that they might find appealing suitors and admiration because the girls are admired as beauties in the community. That shifts when Darcy insults. Elizabeth hopes are dashed and admiration turns to revulsion, and so the scene has its own arc of change with its own value shift, and the inciting incident establishes the beginning value. No matter the level of story I'm focusing on, when I examine an inciting incident, I'm asking, does this inciting incident reinforce the beginning value? Does it show us exactly where the story starts so we can feel the change by the time we reach the end? So there you have it. The seven qualities I'm looking for in a great inciting incident. Here they are again, the inciting incident. Is positive or negative? Never neutral. It comes from outside the character. It disrupts the character's normal. It sparks the character's goal. It's aligned with the genre of the story. It's aligned with the turning point and the climax, and it reinforces the beginning value. And remember, if you want to see all these qualities written down and easy to reference as you edit, grab the free inciting incident cheat sheet. Go to alice slo.com/ 85, enter your email there, and they'll send it straight to you. Now I've encountered a lot of inciting incidents in a lot of manuscripts, and while I'm always watching for all seven traits that I described, there are a few common traps that I often see. They're subtle, lurking underneath inciting incidents that look like they should work. If you've created an inciting incident that you love, but your story still isn't working, check for these traps. I've got four traps for you, Here's the first one. We don't know enough about status quo normal to understand how the inciting incident disrupts it. That probably means that the inciting incident occurs on page one of the book, Or in the first few words of the scene, right at the very, very beginning before we're oriented to the story that leaves readers asking what changed And bereft of any more context, we'll assume that whatever we saw in the inciting incident is the status quo rather than a disruption, interrupting it and kicking our character into action. Here's the second trap. The inciting incident comes from inside the protagonist. This means it's something the protagonist decides, something the protagonist does. It feels spontaneous, like a sudden burst of inspiration to do something big. And since the inciting incident is by definition a disruption, and humans avoid change, this doesn't make sense to us. Why would the protagonist choose to throw a wrench into their own life? It leaves us asking why. Now, this question always makes me think of one of my favorite musicals, Natasha Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812. This show is based on a tiny slice of war and peace by Tolstoy, and at the very start, Pierre sings this, it's dawned on me suddenly, and for no obvious reason that I can't go on living as I am. That stanza makes me laugh every single time because what I hear is Tolstoy didn't write an inciting incident for Pierre, but this story is happening anyway. Why is now the day that Pierre decided he can't go on living as he is? Nobody has a clue, which I suppose means that Tolstoy got away with it, but I don't recommend it for you. Give your protagonist a disruption that throws their life out of order. Don't expect them to throw it out of order spontaneously on their own. Here's the third trap. The inciting incident doesn't kick off a goal. This is like the opposite of the previous trap. If the previous trap was your protagonist taking action and pursuing a goal without a cause to incite them, this trap is that your protagonist does have a cause to incite them, and yet it doesn't push them into motion. They experience the inciting incident, but it doesn't spark a goal for them to pursue. Which leaves us asking why does this matter If the disruption to your protagonist's life leaves them unchanged and unscathed, if it doesn't cause them to pursue a goal, why do we care? If it doesn't matter to them? Why should it matter to us? And finally, the fourth trap is that the inciting incident isn't aligned with the genre, the turning point in climax or the value shift. This trap is tricky because it's really hard to see this at the start of a story. You might have to write your way to the end in order to spot it. If you pull out the inciting incident and look at it on isolation, it might seem rock solid nailing every single quality that I've described in this episode. But put it in the context of a larger story where the genre. Turning points in climax and value shift don't all match and it all falls apart. The story will feel like a confusing jumble of competing ideas. Watch for the following symptoms. You'll get the gut feeling or maybe early feedback that the story as a whole doesn't hold together. And the inciting incidents in climax both seem awesome in theory, but in practice they're falling flat. The climax especially should be a gut punch, but it's more of a gentle tap. These are all signals that the inciting incident, genre, turning point, climax, and value shift are not neatly aligned, and that means it's time to zoom out to do some bigger picture structural work and figure out what the story is really about. So there you have it. The four most common traps I see here they are again. One, we don't know enough about status quo normal to understand how the inciting incident disrupts it, and that makes us asked what changed? Two. The inciting incident comes from inside the protagonist, and that makes us ask why now? Three. The inciting incident doesn't kick off a goal, and that makes us ask why does this matter? And four. The inciting incident isn't aligned with the genre turning point in climax or value shift, and you can tell because the story doesn't hold together and the climax is falling flat. This episode is meaty, so I'll wrap it up here, but it's meaty because it matters. Great stories are built on rock solid story structure, and the inciting incident sets up everything that's to come. Keep in mind that these are all editing tools. I do not recommend dragging your brain through all these layers of analysis. When you're first imagining your story or writing the first draft. Let your creative mind run wild. Then come back when you have a draft and put it through its paces of analysis. And if even that thought sounds overwhelming or makes your brain scream just a little. Don't worry. That's why I'm here. I spend my days analyzing story like this, so you can stay in your creative story flow. If you'd like to work with me and get my feedback on your inciting incident and the rest of your story, head to my website and tell me about your story. Go to alice sudler.com/contact and fill out the form there and I'll be in touch. And don't forget. You can grab a free inciting incident cheat sheet to print out and reference. Anytime you're editing. Go to alice sulo.com/eight five and enter your email address in the form on that page, and I'll send it right to you. And that's it for inciting incidents. This episode is kicking off my goal, which is to do a whole series like this for every element of story. So keep an eye out on the feed for the next installment. Progressive complications coming soon. In the meantime, I hope that this gives you some actionable strategies to shape your inciting incidents into Unputdownable story beginnings. Happy editing.