When Should You Introduce Your Inciting Incident?
Analysis of "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury
📚 Fahrenheit 451 is a classic dystopian novel.
✍️ I studied it and found techniques you can apply to your own writing.
My analysis is broken into four posts:
Part 1: How to introduce characters by showing, not telling
Part 2: When should you introduce your inciting incident?
Part 3: The art of revealing information (Available 5/17)
Part 4: How Ray Bradbury makes you keep reading (Available 5/31)
Here is Part 2:
According to Robert McKee, a story is a design in five parts:
Inciting Incident
Progressive Complications
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
As a story begins, the protagonist’s life is more or less in balance.
He has successes and failures, ups and downs.
Who doesn’t?
But life is in relative control.
Then an event occurs that radically upsets its balance— something either really good or really bad happens.
This is the Inciting Incident.
It propels the protagonist into an active pursuit of an object or goal in order to restore balance in his life.
When should you bring in the Inciting Incident?
As soon as possible.
The instant the reader has a sufficient understanding of character and world to react fully, execute your Inciting Incident.
If an Inciting Incident is archetypal in nature, it requires no setup and can occur immediately.
Ray Bradbury follows this principle in Fahrenheit 451:
No time is wasted in starting the central plot of Fahrenheit 451.
We are immediately introduced to our main character: Guy Montag.
The opening pages of the story really tell us all we need to know about Montag.
He’s a fireman in a dystopian society and his job is to destroy books.
The first chapter quickly shows him destroying books, then he’s at the firestation and beginning his normal commute home.
It’s on his way home that the Inciting Incident occurs:
“The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward.”
Montag meets a young girl, a new neighbor of his, and their conversation causes him to question his entire life. In this moment an object of desire is born: the truth about the world he’s living in.
Ray Bradbury doesn’t waste time and risk boring readers with excessive details about Montag’s life or the world of the story.
Instead, he gives us the needed information and introduces the central plot as soon as possible.
Continue reading my Fahrenheit 451 analysis:
Part 1: How to introduce characters by showing, not telling
Part 2: When you should introduce your inciting incident?
Part 3: The art of revealing information (Available 5/17)
Part 4: How Ray Bradbury makes you keep reading (Available 5/31)
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