There’s Only One Door into Your Story–Build It RIGHT!
10 ESSENTIALS OF A DYNAMITE STORY #8 INCITING INCIDENT
You and your date snuggle down into comfy seats. On the screen in front of you, the Pixar desk lamp comes hop, hop, hopping into its spot between the P and the X, looks at you with its inscrutable light-bulb eye and the show begins.
Between handfuls of popcorn and Raisinettes, you watch as this little green eyeball monster and his furry turquoise friend do life in a world on the other side of closet doors. Then it’s night in the scream factory, furry turquoise monster sees a live door and steps inside to investigate—into a world where the mere touch of a human child is fatal.
You’re getting a little nervous at this point.
Furry monster trips, gets tangled up in mobiles and toys, barely makes it back out into the factory. He leans against the closed closet door panting, and then … he stops by the office to leave the paperwork with Roz the Slug, goes home and orders a pizza. For the next 83 minutes, you watch daily life in Monstropolis.
You leave the theater … unsatisfied.
Next night, you stay home and watch a classic on Netflix. There’s this young man on a desert planet who has bought these two droids—a tall, gold one with a British accent and a blue one the size and shape of a fire hydrant that speaks in honks and beeps. The young man is cleaning sand out of the blue droid’s gears when suddenly … he pulls out a potato chip stuck in the hard drive. Rather than watch the young man cut doughnuts with his land cruiser on an endless expanse of desert sand for the next 75 minutes, you flip off the TV and head to bed.
And you think–didn’t movies used to be better? There was that one about the little girl in Kansas who runs away from home and there’s a tornado and … it takes the roof off the barn. Or the one about the doctor who builds a man out of dead body parts and then lightening … strikes a nearby oak tree. Or that proper British man who wants a proper British nanny for his children and … gets one.
Who knows what’s missing here? Yup, the single element without which all the great characters and wonderful settings in the world won’t take off into a story. What’s missing is an inciting incident.
The characters in a story are sailing along in their “normal world” when something happens. Usually, it is not something the characters do, but something that happens to them, something that jolts the hero out of his everyday routine and lights the fuse of the plot for the whole rest of the story.
In Monsters, Inc, the inciting incident is Boo announcing the presence of a human child in the monster world by picking up Sully’s tail and dropping it. Plunk. After that, life cannot proceed normally for any of the characters.
Before the inciting incident, there is an equilibrium, a relative peace that the characters in a story have grown accustomed to. When something happens that upsets the balance of things, suddenly there is a problem to be solved.
Luke Skywalker in Star Wars sees the holographic message from Princess Leia—“Help me, Obe Wan, Kenobe, you’re my only hope.” And like it or not, Luke is forced to act. He can choose to ignore the message. He can go back and tell the Jawas they sold him a defective droid and demand his money back. Or he can get involved.
A tornado picks up Dorothy’s house and deposits it in Oz. Now, like it or not, Dorothy is forced to do something. She can begin life anew in a land populated by short, fat people with squeaky voices or she can find a way to go back home to Kansas. The Frankenstein monster comes to life—now what? Once the “proper British nanny” turns out to be Mary Poppins, can life go on as-is in that household?
Like every other story element, there are great inciting incidents and also-rans. These are some of the characteristics of a great inciting incident.
1. It must grab your reader’s attention. Pull out the stops and make it dramatic, an event with stakes so high Loyal Reader has to keep turning pages to find out what happens.
2. It has to create conflict. When Dorothy’s house drops down on top of the Wicked Witch of the East, that causes serious relational problems between Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West. Mary Poppins popping into a proper British household and Boo popping into the monsters’ world turn everything in the characters’ lives upside down.
3. It must generate action. Luke doesn’t just sit there looking at the holographic image of a white-robed woman with brown Honey Buns over her ears. He does something. He tries to help her. Sully and Mike do something—they try to return Boo to her bedroom in the human world.
The inciting incident is the door into your story. Without it, Loyal Reader is left to watch Luke cut doughnuts in the sand, Dorothy milk cows and “Googly Bear” marry the dreadful one-eyed purple Celia with rattlesnake hair.
Write on!
9e
