How do you craft the perfect inciting incident?

A look at inciting incidents including why they're needed, what they are and what they might look like.

Hey!

I hope you all had a lovely weekend.

I wanted to write something this week about inciting incidents and the early parts of a novel. It’s something that came up repeatedly in the responses to the survey I sent out last week. Thanks to those of you who filled it in - you can find the form here if you’d like to add any additional thoughts!

An inciting incident is probably something you’ve heard a lot about if you’ve looked at the writing craft, but what really is it, and how do you write a good one?

What is an inciting incident?

Very simply, the inciting incident is the thing that sets your novel in motion and is the very first in the chain of events that make up the novel’s plot. It’s the thing that disrupts the ordinary world of your protagonist.

It can be big or small, and it doesn’t need to be the most dramatic event you can think of. It might be something big, like Katniss taking her sister’s place in the reaping in The Hunger Games. But it might be something low key, like in The Remains of the Day, when Stevens begins the vacation that takes him away from his work and causes everything that happens within the novel.

If you’ve read about inciting incidents elsewhere, you might know of it as the catalyst (from Save the Cat this one) or the hook. These phrases tend to all mean the same thing, simply the first event that sets up the chain that follows.

When does it take place?

It’s pretty common for plotting suggestions (especially those you find online) that you should have an inciting incident at around the 10% mark of your book.

I find this difficult for a few reasons. Firstly, I have no idea where 10% of the final novel is going to be. Secondly, because how do we know if what we’ve written counts as an inciting incident?

This is something that can be easy to make overly complicated. An inciting incident is just the point of no return. But that doesn’t necessarily need to sit at the 10% mark.

If you are planning to write a 300 word novel, many suggestions for an inciting incident would require it taking place at around page 30. The problem with getting caught up on this is that you can end up plodding along aimlessly for 30 pages until you reach the point where something happens. But does it need to take that long?