What is an Inciting Incident?
Lesson from "Story" by Robert McKee
A story is a design in five parts:
Inciting Incident
Progressive complications
Crisis
Climax
Resolution
The inciting incident is the first major event of the telling and the primary cause for all that follows.
Inciting Incident - An event that pitches the protagonist’s life out of kilter, arousing a conscious desire for something he feels will set things right and then goes after.
An inciting incident must be a dynamic, fully developed event— not something vague.
For example: If you’re writing a story about a guy who moves to Los Angeles, don’t have him wake up one morning and merely decide to move. Have a scene where there’s a sudden POUNDING on his door from the police, causing him to flee down the fire escape and head West.
The inciting incident radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life. As a story begins, the protagonist is living a life that’s more or less in balance.
He has successes and failures, ups and downs.
Who doesn’t?
But life is in relative control.
Then, perhaps suddenly but in any case decisively, an event occurs that radically upsets its balance, swinging the value-charge of the protagonist’s reality either to the negative or the positive.
Occasionally, an inciting incident needs two events: setup and payoff.
Let’s look at JAWS:
Setup: A shark eats a swimmer and her body washes onto the beach.
Payoff: The sheriff discovers the corpse and decides to go after the shark.
If an inciting incident requires a setup, the writer cannot delay the payoff — at least not for very long — and keep the protagonist ignorant of the fact that his life is out of balance.
The protagonist must react to the inciting incident. Given the infinitely variable nature of protagonists, any reaction is possible. A refusal to act, however, cannot last for very long. If an event radically upsets our sense of equilibrium and control, what would we want?
To restore balance.
Out of the need to restore the balance thrown off by the inciting incident, the protagonist conceives of an object of desire.
Object of Desire - Something physical or situational or attitudinal that the protagonists lacks or needs to restore balance in his life.
The inciting incident propels the protagonist into an active pursuit of this object or goal, shaping the other four parts of a story’s design.
This was a lesson from Story by Robert McKee.
If you want to pick up your own copy of the book, click here.
Or explore the C.S.M. Fiction archive.
