What Is an Inciting Incident?

Graphic by Peg Ihinger

One of the writing terms that I’ve been hearing a lot lately is “the inciting incident,” which has become steadily more common over the past thirty years or so. Like a lot of the analytical approaches to writing, I think it is much to easy to get wrapped around the axle over it, particularly when one is still making up a first draft.

Part of this is because of the plethora of conflicting definitions for “inciting incident.” A few people use “inciting incident” as a synonym for “the call to adventure.” Other definitions mandate really specific things that this incident has to do: interrupt the character’s peace, establish the stakes, introduce conflict, push the protagonist into action, setting the plot in motion, etc. Some of them even define exactly where this inciting incident should/must take place, ranging from right after an opening hook to after a very specific percentage of the story (depending on the source, this is set as early as 6% of the way into the story or as late as 20%. No source for this statistic is ever given).

Many of these things are impossible to determine until the entire story has been written, in particular how many pages, scene, or story constitute 6-20%. Which is one of several reasons why thinking about a story’s inciting incident is, in my opinion, something best saved for whichever revision pass one uses to find and fix structural issues.

Almost all of the definitions and examples of an inciting incident that I could find include two things: it’s a point of change, and it drags or shoves the main character into the story. Note that “a point of change” does not specify why the change happened. It may be something the protagonist actively chooses to do, like moving to a new place or buying a snow globe, or it may be something that just happens to them, like the tornado that takes Dorothy to Oz or a cancer diagnosis.

“A point of change that punts the main character into the story” seems to me to be a sufficient definition for the term “inciting incident.” Everything in this definition is necessary: if the protagonist’s pre-story life continues without changing, you have a slice-of-life character study. If things change, but the “main character” refuses to get involved, you have a story in which someone else is the protagonist.

How much change is necessary depends on the story. Lots of definitions talk about the inciting incident “interrupting the protagonist’s peaceful life” and “shattering the status quo,” but that’s based on the assumption that the change must be unexpected and unwanted, as well as disruptive. And while that assumption is often the case, there are a lot of stories in which the inciting incident is something that, of itself, is innocuous: an unexpected inheritance, the main character picking up the wrong briefcase, sharing a ride to the same destination, receiving an acceptance letter from a school, buying a book or piece of jewelry at a junk shop, etc.

In other words, the inciting incident can be very ordinary and undramatic; it’s the inevitable consequences that pull the hapless protagonist into the story. It can (and quite often is) the thing the protagonist is talking about when he/she says, “If only I hadn’t decided to visit Aunt Katherine/bought that amulet/eaten that apple/gotten those papers mixed up/answered that phone call back then, I wouldn’t be in this mess now.”

The inciting incident also doesn’t have to come at any particular point in the story. For stories that open in medias res, the inciting incident has happened before the novel opens. Some stories open with the change point; notable examples include the discovery of a body (many murder mysteries, lots of horror novels, Jaws), which conflates the opening hook and the change point that gets the protagonist involved. The tornado that takes Dorothy to Oz occupies the last half of the very short Chapter One.

There are also slow burn stories for which the inciting incident takes many chapters to show up, and even a few like Memento and Ian M. Banks’ Use of Weapons that don’t reveal the obvious inciting incident until almost the end of the book or movie. In other words, proper placement of an inciting incident is not determined by page count. It’s determined by where the story needs it to be.

Furthermore, based on even the most basic definition of inciting incident (a point of change in the protagonist’s life that drags said protagonist into the story), there are at least three events that qualify as inciting incidents for the first Harry Potter book. The first is Voldemort’s murder of Harry’s parents, which not only “shatters his peaceful status quo,” but also cements Harry (rather than Neville) as the only one who, according to the prophecy, can defeat Voldemort, thus pitching him permanently into the seven-volume story arc. Of course, I haven’t seen anyone else cite this as an example, because it happens before the books begin and because some of the information (like the prophecy) isn’t given to the reader until several books into the series.

The second event is arguably Dumbledore leaving the infant Harry on his aunt’s doorstep in the first chapter, which isn’t nearly as dramatic, but which is clearly another major change point for infant Harry (leaving the Wizarding World to live with the Dursleys for the next ten years). And the final inciting incident is the one most lists tag as THE inciting incident for the Harry Potter books: the arrival of Harry’s Hogwarts letter, which is the point where he is old enough (and the reader has enough information) to recognize this as a major change in Harry’s life that’s kicking off the story.

Does it matter that there are three things that could be called The Inciting Incident for Harry Potter? No. It doesn’t matter what you call them or that they don’t all happen 6-20% of the way into the story, or that getting a school letter isn’t, of itself, terribly dramatic (though the Dursleys’ reaction is). What matters is that those incidents work when the reader finds out about them.

In other words: Don’t overthink it.