Graphic by Peg Ihinger
When you drop a rock into a pond, ripples spread out from it in rings that keep going for a long way before they gradually flatten out. Once everything adjusts to the new rock, the water goes back to calm and flat. The bigger the rock, the bigger the splash, the more ripples, and the longer the ripples last.
That’s one of the useful metaphors for an inciting incident in a story. The rock drops into the protagonist’s life, causing ripples of change, until eventually everything reaches a new normal. If it’s a big enough rock—and in novels, it usually is—the shape of the character’s “new normal” can be very, very different from what it looked like when the story started. (I’m thinking of impact crater lakes and shoreline effects.)
It’s useful in another way, too, if you look at actual slow-motion videos of actual rocks dropping into actual puddles and ponds. Because yes, you can get the single set of lovely circular rings around the drop point that most people think of, but you usually also get a lot more. Because the rock doesn’t just cause ripples; it splashes. And each drop of the splash falls back into the water, creating smaller rings of ripples that overlap the big ones from the rock in different places.
If the big ripples are the plot, the little ones are the subplots. Or, if you prefer, the main story arc (plot or character) and the subsidiary/secondary story arcs.
The deeper the water and the bigger the rock, the more splash you get. Translated to fiction, things that affect the protagonist’s life often affect other characters, too, unless the protagonist is a hermit with no friends, family, or acquaintances. effects on those characters can help the protagonist along, cause more difficulties for them, or slip in between the ups and downs of the protagonist’s story without changing much at all.
The writer, of course, gets to decide which way things go. Multiple-viewpoint stories often focus on the way different characters react to whatever splash damage has hit them, and/or on how their stories continue to spread out and interlock, and eventually all settle. Single-viewpoint stories can focus mainly on the primary plotline, where the plot spreads out like a set of neat, concentric ripples, or they can focus on the complicated patterns that different characters’ reactions have on the protagonist as their stories move through and reinforce or undermine the protagonist’s efforts.
For an example, let’s start with George, who has just graduated from wizard school and is looking for a job. Right there, we have a big life change moment—a big rock—but it’s an ordinary, predictable one. So George wants to work for a big wizarding research company, but the only job he can find is with a tiny, desperate startup, because he has no experience.
In this case, the big rock is not so much the predictable life-changing moment; it’s the unexpected place George lands, which has screwed up his plans for the future. George has his big rock; what are the splash effects?
Well, George isn’t working for Wizarding Research, Inc., so they lose out on the benefits of having him work for them. That’s not going to intersect George’s life or plotline immediately, since it’s an opportunity cost they don’t realize they’ve paid. They may not ever. George’s girlfriend Rachel, on the other hand, could be affected in a variety of ways, ranging from a deterioration in their relationship because George’s salary is small and he’s working long hours, to the possibility that she gets sucked into working for the startup, too. George’s parents and siblings may also react to George’s reduced availability and/or the status of his new job. Family friends may tease or sneer at or envy George’s parents because of George’s job.
George’s new colleagues are a whole collection of people who will have reactions to George’s hiring, which will depend on their expectations and ambitions. Ivan may see George as competition for the next promotion; Riley may see him as a potential romance; Su Li may look down on him, either because of his social standing or because of the school he went to or just because George made a bad first impression. The boss had reasons for hiring George that George may fulfill or disappoint.
George’s position at the wizarding research startup is also going to affect the startup’s customers in either positive or negative ways—he may mess up some research in process, delaying whatever the customer asked for, or he may spot a critical flaw in a new spell, earning the startup a good reputation.
Some of these effects are more likely to reflect back into George’s plotline than others, depending on the direction the writer chooses to take. If Rachel joins the startup as well, the main plot will likely be rather different than it would be if Rachel resents the new job and tries to persuade George to leave (or tries to get him fired). If the main plot revolves around George developing a cool new spell for the startup, George’s family may not play much of a part; if the central plot is more character-centered, the specifics of George’s job may not be as big a part as the changes in family dynamics.
On the other side of things, sometimes a rock is so big that it will obviously affect everyone in the story. Disaster novels are obviously at this end of the range—when the tsunami hits, it affects everyone within a mile of the coast. All the writer has to do is decide which characters will be interesting to watch survive.
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