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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27971
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27971
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Inciting incident is a term for one of the bones of a story, the thing that give it shape. But while a story needs shape, shape alone is not enough. The basic story shapes are well enough known and not particularly complicated. Anyone who does a little elementary research should be able to write a story that follows correct story shape.

But while shape is important, it is not where the money is. You have to put flesh on the bones. What the reader encounters when they read is not the bones but the flesh. Without good bones the flesh will seem deformed. But beyond freedom from basic deformities, it is the flesh that attracts us, creates our interest, and holds it.

What does the flesh consist of? Its fundamental attractions are sensual. A good story engages us at the sensual level. I don't mean sexual here, though it can certainly be that, I mean it creates an experience for the senses. It creates a world that has depth and grit and light and texture peopled by people who feel real and animated and particular.

None of this is in the structure. It is in the telling. It begins with observation and sympathy and love and proceeds through care and craft and a sensitive gift for language and the images and experiences it evokes. The way you hold the reader's interest up to the inciting incident is simple, and yet the hardest part of writing: you make it real.

And until you make it real, the inciting incident is for nothing. It incites nothing unless we are first made to care, unless we are made to feel that this is a real thing happening to real people in a real world.

Anyone can assemble the bones. The diagrams are in all the books. Assembling the bones of a story is no more complex than assembling an Ikea bookcase. If the bones of a story end up misshapen it is either because the writer paid no attention to them at all, or because when the writer attempted to apply flesh to the bones they could not get the muscle and sinew right and it pulled the bones out of shape.

There are very obvious and teachable techniques for the bones. The technique for the flesh is mastery of observation and language. That's the hard part. It is why so many aspiring writers will never achieve their aims. There is no formula for it. If it is not simply inspired, it is learned by osmosis from living, reading, and writing.

Original score: 5