Story Structure and the Inciting Incident

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 13, on today's show, we'll be talking about structure, what it is and what it allows us to do with our writing. And one of the most important elements of structure, the inciting event. And welcome back to Inside Creative Writing here at the show's website. My name is Brad Reed, and it's good to be back with episode 13.

That seems like a fitting number for this episode because of the challenge that I've had getting it on the air. I thought I'd give you just a little bit of an update about last week. I've had quite a few of you that have emailed me and given me your well wishes for my surgery. And I've learned that it's not a good idea to just say, I'm off to have surgery. Don't worry about it. It tends to make people curious about what's going on.

So I thought I'd share it both just to ease your curiosity a little bit, but also to spread the word about kind of what I'm dealing with out there, because I think it's something that that is more common than a lot of doctors think it is. So I'm just going to touch on that real quick and then we're going to get into today's topic. Basically, what happened is about four years ago, I started getting really severe floaters in my eyes.

Now, you've almost everybody will occasionally see some little fleck of something kind of floating around in their eye, especially if they're looking out at the bright skyline or at their bright computer screen or something, you may see something just kind of flash across your vision. Well, that's technically a floater. Yes.

But what I was dealing with was what much more severe, wherein both eyes, I've had pieces of the lining coming loose and really turning my eyes into, I have trouble describing what it is, but the best I've come up with is imagine if your eyes were filled with like snow globe stuff and it was just kind of always in there moving around, getting in your in your field of vision. And I think you can begin to understand how frustrating and debilitating that could be for a guy who who loves to read. At times it made it just almost impossible. And most of the doctors that I'd seen about it said, you know, it's just something you're going to have to learn to live with. There's not a treatment for it.

But I found that there's just a handful of doctors in the world that actually do a laser treatment for this. And this was my third and fourth treatments that I traveled here to California for last week. And I'm happy to say that one eye is now probably about 80 to 85 percent better, which is just life changing for me to be able to sit down and read and see the words and not have to kind of see through all this debris is is liberating. It's wonderful. The other eye is a little bit more stubborn. I'm probably at about 40 to 50 percent improvement there, which is still amazing from from, you know, having been told that there was nothing that could be done.

So that's a little bit of an update about what I'm dealing with. And I guess I can help serve as the apology for missing last week. I thought I was going to make it back in plenty of time to get a show done. The flight schedule just ended up being much more hectic than I thought it would. And the treatments just more aggressive. It took me a little more time to recover than I thought it would.

So good news, bad news there. Good news. I'm on the mend. Bad news that I had to to miss last week.

But what it did do is give me a lot of time to really think about what I wanted to talk about this week. And it's going to start off a little bizarre, I think a little strange. And maybe you're getting used to that from me.

But I want to start our conversation today by talking about claymation. That's right. Yes, certainly. It's a form of storytelling, but I don't really want to look at it even from that aspect. I want to look at it from the aspect of the claymation figures themselves, how they're built and the way that they're built, how that allows the claymation artist to do what he or she wants to do with them.

Now, what's really interesting about this, and I've never done any kind of claymation animation, but it always fascinated me, you know, that we could bring these claymation figures to life. And I'd always wondered how it was done. So with a little free time on my hand and YouTube at my fingertips, I was able to take kind of a crash course in the technology behind claymation. And what's interesting is that underneath these characters, we find really skeletons. They call them armatures. And they literally, before they sit down and build one of these clay figures, they build the skeleton with all of its joints, all of its pivots intact, so that when they build the clay around it, they can put these tiny little movements in it.

You know, they can move a finger a little bit, or they can move an elbow a little bit, or a leg or a knee just a little bit for each frame without having to entirely reconstruct this claymation figure. In other words, it's this skeleton, this armature inside of these claymation figures that allow them to, one, create figures that look recognizable. In other words, you know, as they're building these skeletons, they're making sure that the dimensions are right. You know, that the arm length is right to match the leg length, which is right to match the torso and the head placement and all of this stuff. It creates, it allows the claymation artist to create a character that we recognize as human and that looks right to us. It also keeps those characters consistent.

If you could imagine the difficulty in building and building and rebuilding and rebuilding the same character over and over again for different shots and different poses, to keep that character consistent would be almost impossible, especially in frames that come at us so quickly like they do in claymation. Those minute little changes would be immediately jarring. And this skeleton, we'll call it, really allows the claymation artist to keep that character consistent.

The third thing it does is it allows for the kind of movement that the artist needs from the character. If you remember the old, I can't remember if the old, old GI Joe's arms bent in the elbows and the knees, but, you know, I'm thinking of like Barbie dolls. You know, it's hard to make a Barbie doll move in a realistic kind of way, but these claymation figures are so jointed and so designed that they can do virtually any movement that they need that character to do as long as that skeleton within it is built correctly. What's really interesting, too, is the different levels to which these skeletons can be built. Anything from just taking simple wire and kind of winding it and bending it together to make roughly the shape of a person and then building clay on that, all the way up to the really high end where everything is very intricate sockets and joints that all have different tensions built into them. And it's interesting why that is.

You know, the the tension built into a wrist joint is very, very little. The tension built into the elbow is a little bit stiffer. The the tension built into the shoulder is a little bit stiffer than that. And into the waist is even stiffer than that, so that as the artist grabs the hand and tweaks it just a little bit, it's only the wrist that it'll turn. It won't turn the elbow or the shoulder. Or when they grab the arm, it's only the shoulder that will turn.

Understanding Story Structure

It won't turn the whole character at the waist. So there's a lot of thought and a lot of technique involved in creating the skeletons for these claymation figures. Now, what in the world am I doing talking about claymation skeletons on a podcast about creative writing? Well, we're going to talk about structure today and I want us to think of the structure for our stories as this skeleton, this armature underneath these puppets.

So we're going to be looking at some similarities between the two and how it'll help us better use structure and understand the purpose of structure by making this analogy to a claymation puppet. At least I hope it will. It does for me.

So this is what structure does for our stories, too. It's not something that should be seen or obvious in your story. It'd be like seeing the inner skeleton of a claymation puppet. You know, take a little bit of the suspension of reality that these puppets are actually alive if we see the wire, you know, sticking out of their neck or sticking out of their fingers. It's not meant to be seen. It's meant to be below the surface, but it's something that allows your story to be recognizable as a story.

In other words, there is a structure. There is a skeleton to the way we tell stories that dates back to the beginning of storytelling. I would imagine there's a structure to these stories that have to be in there, have to be underneath the surface of your story for us to recognize it as a story, for us to relate to it as a story. It also exists to keep your story consistent in much the same way as that skeleton of the claymation puppet does. And maybe most importantly, it allows for the kind of movement that your story needs to make. We can almost think of these points of structure within your story as the places where your story moves, the places where you're able to move your story in the way that you want to because that structure is underneath it supporting it.

Now that leads to the question, which structure? Now if you're fairly new to writing, this whole idea of structure may be a little of other approaches to structure in our stories. You know, it's the same in claymation, from the basic twisted wire structure of kind of the poor man's armature for claymation, is it that basic twisted wire structure or does your story require the very high-tech, high-end ball joint skeletons? The question is, what does your story need? What kind of structure does your story need? And what do you work best with?

What allows you to create the kind of characters that you want to create? So what about seat-of-the-pants writers? If you're a seat-of-the-pants writer that sits down and just likes to, you know, create the characters and then follow them, see where they go, see what adventures they have, and kind of let the story unravel itself, you might be pushing back against this idea that a story must have a structure. And I think kind of the champion of this seat-of-the-pants writing has, in a way, become Stephen King in his book On Writing. He really champions this method of just creating compelling characters, putting them in interesting situations, and then letting them tell you their story, letting the story just develop. The pushback that I give against that is that when you read King's writing, or really any good seat-of-the-pants writer for that matter, you will find structure.

These aren't just free-form stories that have no skeleton to them. I think for these writers, either they've been writing long enough that structure has become second nature to them, and it just comes naturally in the way that they invent these stories and the way the stories come out. Or it's something that is implanted into the story in revision.

In other words, the seat-of-the-pants is kind of the effort to get the story down, to generate the ideas for the story and to see where it's going, but then in revision they go back and imbue structure into the story so that it stands up. I mean, literally, that's what a claymation puppet needs a skeleton for, is to stand on its own two feet. Otherwise, it's clumsy, it's unrealistic, and it's unconvincing. A story without a structure is the same. It's clumsy, it's unrealistic, or at least it comes across to the reader as unrealistic, and it's unconvincing. The story needs some element of structure.

Like I said, maybe that's the bare wire structure, just the slightest hint of structure just to keep it on its feet, so to speak, or maybe it's the really high-end, high-tech, intricate structure. Your story will tell you that as well as your writing style. So, is that to say that we can't experiment with structure?

Of course not. And I think as writers, we should experiment with structure. I can't imagine one of the top-of-the-line claymation artists not experimenting with the way they build their armatures, with the way they build their skeletons.

Of course they're going to try different things. Of course they're going to approach it in an artistic way and do something new. And we certainly need to be doing that as writers, too. Structure, I think, is too often seen as rules or as something that inhibits our writing. And I hope in using this analogy that we're able to see it not as something that inhibits our writing, but the very thing that allows us to be creative. And there's a reason that no two claymation puppets look the same.

You can take the same or virtually the same skeleton or armature and do almost anything with it creatively. And that's the same with structure. It doesn't dictate your story. It gives your story the skeleton that it needs to stand on its own two feet and be recognized as a story.

The Inciting Event Explained

So since we have a little bit of time today, I want to touch on what I think may be the most important element of structure. And based on my experience in a whole bunch of writing classes and reading a lot of other writers, is the element that is often overlooked. And that's dangerous, I mean, to our writing to have what might be the most important element to be the one that's most often overlooked. This is important. The element I'm going to refer to as the inciting event.

Now, if you're taking writing classes, read other writing books. You've probably heard this called other things, but I see it most commonly as the inciting event. So that's the term that we're going to work with anyway. And the inciting event is basically the thing, the event that throws your character into the story.

So in other words, life for this character was fairly normal, good or bad. And then this thing happened that throws them into the story. Now, the best way, I think, to understand inciting event is to look at a few examples. And kind of the classic example, I think, is Star Wars. Here you have Luke Skywalker, whose life is, you know, it's pretty normal. He's just kind of a farmer on, is it Tatooine?

I think that's right. I'm sure I'll hear from Star Wars fans if I'm wrong about any of this, but I think he's on Tatooine. And, you know, there's some other things that might be lesser inciting events that happen, but the big one in Star Wars is when his aunt and uncle are killed, his home is destroyed, and he's thrown headlong into his adventure. He doesn't have the choice just to stay at home and kind of ignore this R2-D2 robot and all this Obi-Wan Kenobi thing. He's thrown into a story at that point.

Let's look at one from literature, The Grapes of Wrath. What might be, depending on the day, my favorite book. We have the Jodes who lose their home. I mean, they literally, you know, almost just like Luke Skywalker, their home is gone. They're forced out to do something else, and they must travel to California, which forms the basis of the book, The Grapes of Wrath.

Let's look at one short story version of an inciting event that we looked at last week, or two weeks ago. So hopefully you've read it. And it's the story Hills Like White Elephants. On the first read, you may not see an inciting event in that story. And in fact, there isn't one in that story, literally in the black and white words on the page.

But there very much is an inciting event. And this is something we see a lot in shorter fiction. We see stories where the inciting event has already happened. And the short story is actually the fallout or the aftermath of that inciting event.

So in Hills Like White Elephants, the inciting event is that the woman has gotten pregnant. And the fallout of that is that these two have to make a decision about having the abortion. So, you know, they don't have the choice of just sitting around not doing anything. I mean, this baby is inside her. It is growing and something is going to happen that's going to change this eventually.

So they're thrown by this pregnancy into the story. That's the inciting event that we don't even see on the page, but it's certainly, certainly there in the story. A little bit more generic. I didn't think of a specific one, but a lot of love stories have as their inciting event this when they meet this person that they realize they suddenly can't live without. You know, in other words, there's no going back to just life as usual.

Now that they know this person is in the world, their world has changed and they're thrown into the story, into this love story. So there are some things that these inciting events have in common. And I'm sure you picked up on some of them as I was introducing those examples. And I think these commonalities are indicative of what makes a good inciting event.

Characteristics of a Good Inciting Event

So we're going to go through these here real quick. There's just three of them. The first is that they happen early in the story. I mean, this is the moment that throws our character into the action of the story. It's really when the excitement and the tension starts.

So it really has to come soon in the story. We've probably all read work, maybe not published work, that just doesn't ever seem to start. The story never seems to go, or if it does, it's far too long into the story where we just, we almost don't care anymore about it.

So the inciting event has to happen early in the story. Secondly, this inciting event has to force the character into taking action. Now this, this can be subtle, certainly. And I've given you, you know, examples that aren't subtle, but in some way it has to force the character into taking action.

In other words, the character can't just choose to do nothing and keep living life as normal. If that's the case, you know, why are we reading the story? Where's the tension? And that leads us into the third thing that our inciting event has to do. It has to illustrate for us the stakes of the story. What is at risk?

What is the worst that can happen to this character because of this inciting event? What is the best that can happen to this character because of the inciting event? The answer to those questions reveals what the stakes of the story are, and so much of those stakes are set up for us by the inciting event. And an inciting event can fail on any one of these elements. Maybe they come too late and we've lost the reader. Or it might give the character the option to simply do nothing and go on with life as usual.

Or the stakes that they set up are just too small. In other words, if the character fails to achieve what they must achieve, that's no big deal. Who cares? You know, that's a death knell for our inciting event and it's a death knell for our story. Something has to be on the line.

Questions to Strengthen Your Inciting Event

So this is Like it needs to move. So but if you can identify it, if you can look at your story and say, Yep, that's it right there. That's my inciting event. That's the moment that throws my character into the story. Ask yourself three questions about it.

The first is, does that inciting event come as early as possible in my story? And I'm not saying very first thing, although that's that's quite effective. And we see that a lot in screenplays where our stories have to be very condensed that we begin with that inciting event.

But it is key to have it as early as it possibly makes sense to grab our readers, to throw them into our story, just like we're throwing our character into the story. The second question I want you to ask is, does it force your character to take action? Or can your character simply choose to do nothing and his or her life will continue on basically as normal? If they can, if they can just ignore it and go back to normal life. My argument is that it's not an inciting event. It doesn't incite the character to do anything.

He or she can just ignore it. And the third question that I think is really key is to ask yourself this, what is the worst that can happen as a result of this event? In other words, are the risks high enough? This is where tension comes into our story. This is where stakes come into our story. And as a result of that, this is where our reader comes into our story because suddenly something is on the line.

So does it come as early as possible in my story? Does it force the character to take action? And what is the worst that can happen as a result of this event? I hope through that process, asking yourself those questions will help you strengthen what I think is one of the most important moments in your story. The inciting event.

Wise Words on Inciting Events

So our wise word this week is going to come from author Donald Miller. You might know him best for a book on spirituality called Blue Like Jazz, kind of a memoir. But the book this actually comes from is a follow up to that. It's called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. If you're a writer, I really recommend this book. It's a memoir telling his story of basically making the movie version of Blue Like Jazz.

Now, unfortunately, I didn't like the movie version of Blue Like Jazz, but his story of how that came about and what and how his life was informed by understanding the story structure is is powerful. I'm tempted to go at length into it and maybe we will at some point because I think it's it's key to understand. But he talks a lot about story structure and and how we can incorporate that into into making our lives, into living our lives, making our lives the stories that we want them to be.

Anyway, getting off the point here is our wise word this week is from Donald Miller. The book again is A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. And he says the inciting incident is how you get characters to do something. It's the doorway through which they can't return. The story takes care of the rest. And I love that because it kind of supports this idea that the inciting event holds within it kind of the elements of your entire story.

You know, life is normal before then this thing happened. A lot of your story is trying to either get back to that normal life or to find a new normal. So the inciting event, check out A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I'll put a link up on the website. It's inside CreativeWriting. com slash 13 is the direct URL for this episode where you'll find the show notes.

But go check out that book. It's it's it's fascinating. He talks. I'm just going to go ahead and go into a little bit because I love it so much.

But he talks a little bit about how we can take this idea of an inciting event and live it in our lives. He talks about how, you know, as humans, we don't really change that much unless we're forced to and that we can create our own inciting events in our lives, our own moments where we force ourselves into action to change our lives to be more like we want them to be. So it's it's fascinating. It informs not only how we live our own lives, but how we how we can create the lives and the stories of our characters.

So with that, it's great to be back. I'm hoping we don't have any more missed episodes anytime soon. And I think I've got the technology figured out to start getting some interviews back on the show.

So hopefully you'll be looking forward to those. Until then, remember, the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. And I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.