by C. S. Lakin
The Hunger Games is a great example. We have the opening scenes showing Katniss with her family, showing the world situation, showing her skill at hunting, showing the two key male characters that will be her love interests. And, boom! The reaping takes place, her sister is chosen for the deadly games, and Katniss volunteers as Tribute in Prim’s place.
The Inciting Incident can be big or subtle. It may be one specific scene; it may take place over a few scenes. It all depends on your story. This should answer this oft-asked question: Where should I start my story?
Why, at or directly before the Inciting Incident. Simple.
What Your Setup Isn’t
A lot of beginning writers spend chapters setting up their world and characters, explaining the backstory, and boring their readers. Your job as an expert storyteller requires you to know your world and characters and all their backstory but to hold back almost all of it. And especially in the opening chapters.
What do I mean here? Most of the info you create on your world and characters should inform the story. It should seep through your characters’ attitudes, dialogue, behavior, and thought processes. Not told about. Readers want to watch and learn about your characters as they act, respond, process, and opine on what goes on around them.
Too many beginning writers are missing the boat on this very simple structural rule. Just start the story in action, showing something “already happening” in your protagonist’s life in a way that reveals him and his situation. Objective: to get your reader to know him ASAP and to be interested in what happens to him.
What the Setup Is All About
The setup is tricky but essential to nail. You have to be concise, succinct, and deliberate regarding what you show and tell about your character. Because . . . you don’t want to take a whole lot of time (numerous chapters) to do this. Little bits, small tells, that quickly get your reader on board with your protagonist.
Really, coming up with a starting point for your novel shouldn’t be all that hard. Opening scene: set up your protagonist, then hit him with the Inciting Incident. (Now, you may have an opening scene, such as a prologue, that doesn’t feature your protagonist, so I’m talking about the first scene with your protagonist, which, if it isn’t the first scene, would most likely be the second scene.)
Let’s take a look at The Fault in Our Stars, a YA contemporary novel by John Green about two teens with cancer who fall in love. A challenging story because, well, it’s a depressing topic. So while, one assumes, it would be easy to write a novel that quickly gets the reader to pity the heroine, Hazel, the last thing an author wants for his characters is pity.
The Inciting Incident, since this is a romance, is “the meet.” Hence, the opening scene shows how Hazel meets Gus.
That first setup scene has to get readers to like and care about Hazel, and Green, a master wordsmith and fabulous writer, gets across Hazel’s character powerfully and quickly.
Think about it. Here’s a sixteen-year-old girl who basically has a death sentence and has been around dying kids for a few years. She doesn’t get to have a normal life. She doesn’t get to think happily about her future because she probably won’t live into adulthood. To survive, she has to cop a certain hard attitude, yet, for readers to like her, she has to have a measure of self-deprecation balanced with yearning, angst, and misery.
I’m going to share the opening page or two so you can see what a great job Green did in inspiring empathy in readers as well as setting up Hazel’s health, character’s voice, relationship with family, attitude about life, and the situation she is in that becomes the Inciting Incident.
NOTE: I’m putting in bold all the important elements that are being set up and that come into play strongly in the plot or serve as repetitive motifs (the latter are important to introduce in the opening scene).
CHAPTER ONE
Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.
Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.) But my mom believed I required treatment, so she took me to see my Regular Doctor Jim, who agreed that I was veritably swimming in a paralyzing and totally clinical depression, and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly Support Group.
This Support Group featured a rotating cast of characters in various states of tumor-driven unwellness. Why did the cast rotate? A side effect of dying.
The Support Group, of course, was depressing as hell. It met every Wednesday in the basement of a stone-walled Episcopal church shaped like a cross. We all sat in a circle right in the middle of the cross, where the two boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been.
I noticed this because Patrick, the Support Group Leader and only person over eighteen in the room, talked about the heart of Jesus every freaking meeting, all about how we, as young cancer survivors, were sitting right in Christ’s very sacred heart and whatever.
So here’s how it went in God’s heart: The six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story— how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we’re doing today. I’m Hazel, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my lungs. And I’m doing okay.
Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to Patrick, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren’t dying. Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had.
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five . . . so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a long-faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.
And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare occasions when Isaac shared with the group, a recurrence had placed his remaining eye in mortal peril.
Isaac and I communicated almost exclusively through sighs. Each time someone discussed anticancer diets or snorting ground-up shark fin or whatever, he’d glance over at me and sigh ever so slightly. I’d shake my head microscopically and exhale in response.
So Support Group blew, and
after a few weeks, I grew to be rather kicking-and-screaming about the whole affair. In fact, on the Wednesday I made the acquaintance of Augustus Waters, I tried my level best to get out of Support Group while sitting on the couch with my mom in the third leg of a twelve-hour marathon of the previous season’s America’s Next Top Model, which admittedly I had already seen, but still.
Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.”
Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.”
Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.”
Mom: “Television is a passivity.”
Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.”
Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.”
Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.”
Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.”
Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.”
Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.”
Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.”
Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.”
That shut me up, although I failed to see how attendance at Support Group met the definition of life. Still, I agreed to go—after negotiating the right to record the 1.5 episodes of ANTM I’d be missing.
I went to Support Group for the same reason that I’d once allowed nurses with a mere eighteen months of graduate education to poison me with exotically named chemicals: I wanted to make my parents happy. There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.
I hope you were as “wowed” by this opening as I was. Do we like Hazel? Of course. Yes, we feel pity for her. But we feel more.
She is tough, snarky, but also so sensitive. Doesn’t it just break your heart to read that line about her wanting to make her parents happy? She often thinks (and the scenes show) about how much her parents are in anguish over her cancer and impending death. She hates that she is putting them through this, through no fault of her own (yes, it is the fault of the stars—sorry, Shakespeare, you’re wrong here).
Her sense of humor is tainted with heavy cynicism, and rightly so. But we don’t blame her for that. In fact, we applaud her use of it to stay brave.
The meet? She’s already talking about when she met Augustus (Gus), the love interest, close to page 1, but then we get to watch her play out the scene in which she meets him, shortly after this intro. The purpose of chapter one is to reveal the meet—true to solid romance structure (which we’ll get to in a later chapter).
But it’s also, as I said, meant to hook you into the story via Hazel’s character.
All this to say: you need to start your novel where it needs to start, and that’s right at or shortly before the Inciting Incident.
Don’t have an Inciting Incident? Then you have a BIG problem.
Sure, as a caveat I will say that I imagine there are some terrific novels floating around out there without Inciting Incidents. But honestly, I can’t think of any. Can you?
So, that’s our first of five key turning points. What is the first turning point in your story? Can you clearly identify it? Does it come near the start of your novel? If not, you have some work to do.
* * *
Your assignment: Identify your Inciting Incident. Write a paragraph of two about this incident and what it needs to accomplish, why it’s the incident that sets up your premise and launches your story. Answer this: How does my Inciting Incident shift my protagonist’s direction? How does it set up the goal to come?
If you don’t have an Inciting Incident yet, or yours seems to suck, brainstorm a number of possible scenes/situations for your character that might possibly work. Think: How will you set up your character in that opening scene to reveal her situation and core need and immediate problems/goal such that she will be quickly understood and empathized with? Don’t rush this—it’s probably one of the most, if not the most, important scenes in your novel.
Chapter 5: Turning Points #2–5
Now that you have your first turning point well in hand, you need to consider the second turning point, which occurs at about the 25% mark in your novel. What happens at that key moment? Something that pushes that new desire created at the Inciting Incident in the direction of a specific goal.
Thelma and Louise, in the Inciting Incident (in the movie of that name), feel the need to leave town and go on an adventure, get away from their boring or oppressive life situations. At turning point #2, they leave town.
In many stories, this turning point shows a character leaving one place to head to another. The hero may be setting off on an adventure (The Hobbit), the heroine could be starting a new job working for an awful boss (The Devil Wears Prada), the hero could be moving to a new town (to deal with any number of things: care for an aging parent, investigate a murder, dig up dinosaur bones). You get the idea.
But your character doesn’t have to physically move to another location at this turning point. The “new direction” she could be heading in could be taking on a new court case or acquiring a new client. It could be when a mother, having learned (Inciting Incident) that her child has a serious disease, quits her lucrative career to stay at home. But this new direction is created by the Inciting Incident.
In the movie Baby Boom, a high-powered New York businesswoman inherits a baby due to a death in the family (Inciting Incident), and she does all she can to get rid of it. But when it’s clear she has to step up and be mom, the goal is fixed for the rest of the movie. She now has to find a way to make her career work with this unexpected shift in her lifestyle.
In Tootsie, Michael Dorsey is struggling to make it as an actor (the setup). Desperate, he tries out for a female part in a popular soap opera disguised as a woman. When he gets the part and decides to take it, his goal is fixed. How will he be able to pull it off?
In The Martian, stranded astronaut Mark Watney is determined not to die on Mars, while back on Earth, NASA directs satellites to Mars to check to see if there is any sign of life, only to discover Watney is surely alive. In this case, both Watney (protagonist) and NASA (ally) fix their goals at this mark.
From the second turning point up to the Midpoint (50% mark), the character is off on a course to reach her goal. It’s about progress and setbacks. It’s about encountering opposition.
So now we’ve looked at:
Turning point #1 - 10% mark (roughly): Inciting Incident
Turning point #2 – 25% mark (roughly): visible goal established for the novel
Turning Points 3, 4, and 5
Turning Point # 3 takes place at the 50% mark or Midpoint. Yes, it’s called the Midpoint. The Midpoint is the full “door of no return,” which we’ll look at closer later. The character is committed; he’s all-in. He’s gotten a peek of what he’s facing in the way of opposition. It doesn’t mean he won’t slip back, fail, briefly change his mind, or have regrets. A good story will have all that. But it is a pivotal moment of commitment for the character.
Turning Point #4 comes at around the 75% mark. This is the dark moment before the climax. The last push amid the biggest obstacles and challenges. It’s the point when the character wants to quit, feels a failure, loses all support, loses his faith, slides back into whatever previous persona gave him false shelter all these years. In other words, things look hopeless or impossible.
This fourth turning point ushers in the final push for the story in which the character has to buck up, rebound from retreat or setback or loss or failure, and draw on every resource and ounce of determination to stay the course.
Of course, every novel is going to vary in degrees regarding this turning point. But the stronger this “dark night of the soul” moment, the more powerful the story.
Turning point
#5 is another obvious one, but, surprisingly, a whole lot of novels fall way short here. And that’s the big climax. This is the moment when the protagonist either reaches or fails to reach his goal. This is the point in the story when all the internal and external conflict crash head-on and the answers to the two MDQs are revealed.
What’s an MDQ, you ask? It’s the Major Dramatic Query (or question) you set up at the start of your story (which I explain at length in Writing the Heart of Your Story). With every story, you need to have both a visible (plot) query and a spiritual or emotional (inner motivation) query that directly relate to your premise.
If you’ve structured your novel correctly, you’ve presented the two questions for the hero: one that speaks to the visible goal and one to the spiritual goal. “Will Katniss win the Hunger Games competition?” (visible goal) and “Will Katniss emotionally survive intact and not compromise her integrity by the end?” (spiritual goal).
Your story may have additional questions that are answered in the climax, such as “Will the hero get the girl?” (a must in romance genres). But all the major questions posed at the start of your story get answered at turning point #5.
Let’s take a brief look again at all five points. Keep in mind these percentage marks are not set in stone but are guidelines for basic placement. Your story may require tweaking depending on your plot and genre. You can use this little chart for your assignment below.
Turning Points:
#1: The Inciting Incident or “Opportunity” (10% mark)
#2: The Fixed Goal (25% mark)
#3: The Midpoint (50% mark)
#4: The “Dark Moment” (70-75% mark, right before the climax)
#5: The Climax (75-99% mark)
We’ll take a deeper look at these turning points in the next chapters.