A strange thing happens when you spend your life studying how stories work – you start to think life works that way too.
Or at least I did.
When I realized I wanted to be a writer, I dedicated myself to mastering the craft. I read everything that was recommended to me—Campbell, Fields, Snyder, McKee. . .
I learned that all stories start with a character who yearns for something, something his normal world keeps from him. No matter how badly the main character wants this thing, he's being held back. Held back by something he needs to learn. Some people call this the character's wound, or tragic flaw, or the lie that the character believes. But however you want to think about it, it's a problem that holds the main character back and keeps them from getting what they want.
When a story begins, the main character is oblivious to this lie, so the story gods (or you, the writer) throw something at the him to shake things up. Campbell called this the "Call to Adventure," but most screenwriters today refer to it as the "Inciting Incident." It's a letter arriving from Hogwarts; two droids dropping out of the sky; a man on the news, asking if anyone knows the young woman wearing a necklace in the drawing he just pulled from the depths of the ocean. . .
What’s important about the inciting incident is that it’s an external invent, something the main character does not create or cause. This is important because, if the main character knew he had a problem and wanted to solve it, there’d be no conflict when this inciting incident arrives, therefore no narrative tension.
And conflict is the engine of stories; tension the glue that keeps the audience interested.
As I continued my study of stories, I began to internalize this information. I wasn't learning so much as uncovering things I'd long believed to be true. I identified my want and started looking for my wound, thinking that if I could identify it, I’d be ready when my inciting incident arrived. Nothing would be holding me back.
* * *
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion writes at the beginning of her glorious essay "The White Album," where she chronicles the nonsensical events of LA in the late 60s. A child is abandoned by her mother in the middle of the freeway, an old man is murdered in Laurel Canyon, racial tensions simmer with the Huey Newton case, and everything comes to a head with the Tate-LaBianca murders by the Manson Family.
Didion believed that she could make sense of life by writing, that she could find the connection between this and that and unravel the meaning. But looking back on those events, it seems no connection could be found.
Didion’s quote has always stood out to me, and I don’t think I realized why until recently. I too believe that stories are a sort of facsimile for life. I thought I was learning from all the stories I’d read not only how to write but how to live. I thought I might be able to crack some ancient code and get ahead, spare myself from some of the pain and suffering I’d seen so many characters go through.
I now realize I was holding myself back.
Life isn’t a story. Stories are simply what we make out of it. Looking back, trying to make sense out of the pieces, figure out what it all means. Stories only happen in review.
There’s no climax or midpoint, and there’s no inciting incident. No letter comes in the mail inviting you to your adventure nor do droids drop out of the sky to set you on your path to destiny.
Instead, you just wake up one day and realize you need to change your life. And then you do it again. And again, until someday, something comes from it.
For more information about inciting incidents, check out these resources:
· John August and Craig Mazin's discussion on Scriptnotes about inciting incidents: Episode 80 - Rhythm and Blues
· No Film School: What is an Inciting Incident? (Definitions and Examples)
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