Inciting moment definition literature11/24/2023 ![]() In the words of Syd Field in his legendary book Screenplay, “the inciting incident… sets the story in motion … the key incident what the story is about, and draws the main character into the story line.” If we were to envision our story as a row of dominos, the inciting event would be the first domino. Sometimes the key and inciting events are the same event (the Great Sebastian’s arrival in The Greatest Show on Earth) sometimes they happen one right after the other (the children arriving in Narnia through the painting and their subsequent joining up with Caspian in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader) sometimes the entirety of the first act separates them (the arrival of the prisoners in the camp and the digging of the first tunnel in The Great Escape), and sometimes one or the other occurs before the story proper even begins (the war in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood). Most authors are familiar with the idea of the inciting event as being the moment when the story “officially” begins and the character’s life is forever changed. However, we find a lot of misconceptions floating around about the inciting event, and many of them result from the simple fact that the “key event” is often forgotten altogether. Now that we’ve got a sense of the hook, the first act, and the first major plot point, we can see more clearly how and where the inciting and key events affect these moments. ![]() I’ve saved our discussion of inciting and key events until this late into the series because these events can take place at any number of the structure points we’ve already discussed. The first quarter of your story hinges upon two important and irreversible moments: the inciting event and the key event.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |