The Set-up is not the Story.

‘A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.’ 

Poetics, Aristotle

Most people who have been telling stories for a while are familiar with the idea of an Inciting Incident. The event that begins the story, that forces change in the protagonist’s life, that causes the discomfort they will spend the rest of the story attempting to ease. 

As Aristotle says in the quote above, this is the one free card a storyteller gets. The one time they don’t need to explain to readers why something has happened. The inciting incident can be a random event: a chance meeting in a coffee bar, or an act of God like a hurricane that rips through a town, destroying the protagonist’s house and killing their family. Or it could even be the election of a rogue, demonic world leader – the last of which will have come about for a multitude of reasons, as history has shown us, but the point is if this is the inciting incident that kick-starts your hero’s journey, then you don’t need to go into the reasons why that crazy person is now in power, you just need this event to start directly affecting the person we care about, your protagonist. 

(And from then on, everything that happens needs to be causal! But that’s another post…)

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What I most want to talk about in this post is the problem that sometimes occurs in manuscripts I read (and in my own) of a weak Inciting Incident. Here are some examples: 

1) The protagonist moves to another town.

2) The protagonist is an alcoholic, and gets drunk again.

3) The protagonist starts a new job. 

4) A hurricane rips through town, destroying the protagonist’s home and killing their family.

Now wait, you might be saying - that last one sounds like a pretty strong Inciting Incident, plus you used it as an example in the first paragraph. And you are correct in both cases. The hurricane is a highly dramatic Inciting Incident, which undoubtedly upsets the balance of the hero’s life in a profound manner. And if, for instance you started your story with the hero living his normal life - say he’s a farmer in 19th century Devon, with a wife and two children – and then, after an opening chapter spent establishing the normality of this hard-working but happy life, the hurricane arrived…that would makes this event an excellent Inciting Incident.

If, however, you opened the story with the hurricane having already happened - descriptions of the flattened house and fields, the funerals of the wife and kids - as dramatic as these effects are, they would NOT make up an inciting incident. Because the big event, the hurricane, didn't happen on the page.

And this brings us to a really important RULE: Readers need to experience the Inciting Incident.

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A really good way to check your Inciting Incident is to imagine you are telling the story aloud to some willing friends. If you begin by saying ‘so there was this farmer whose house and farm were destroyed, and his family all got killed by a hurricane…’ can you feel how the listeners, because the hurricane has already happened, would be still waiting for the next thing? The thing this story is about. They would be sympathetic to the farmer’s position, but they’d still be waiting to hear what began a change in his life.

For the inciting incident to do the work it should, readers need to experience it, along with the protagonist. They need to see a little of the before, as well as the after. Otherwise, no matter how bad things are for the protagonist in the opening pages, we will still be wondering when the story is going to begin. 

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And this is why the first three examples I gave of Inciting Incidents are weak: the hero moves to another town, gets drunk, starts a new job. Each of these are useful Set-ups. They instill a ready-made vulnerability in the protagonist - she doesn’t know many people in the new town, he’s an alcoholic, she wants to do well in their new job. But that vulnerability isn’t enough to grab the reader’s attention on its own. It’s fertile ground; that’s all.

If you make something happen within that Set-up, however – something happy or sad that unbalances our protagonist, impelling him to seek a new object of desire – then we’re away.

Now we’ve begun and we want to know more.