TRANSCRIPT

You know, I did not invent the idea of an inciting incident. No writer on writing has invented the idea of inciting incident. It’s been around ever since stories existed. Inciting incidents, or whatever you want to call them, a “catalyst,” “the day that everything changes,” “the moment the lightning bolt strikes,” the reason the inciting incident matters is that if you have no inciting incident, you have no story. You just have stuff. Okay, so let me explain. Steven Spielberg likes to say, following Aristotle 2000 years ago, that great stories have a beginning, middle, and end. That's what we mean we talk about the three act structure: beginning (Act I), middle (Act II), and end (Act III). Steven Spielberg also likes to say that the problem today is that we often have beginnings, maybe sometimes we have a middle, but we rarely have an end. The inciting incident is what creates the beginning. It's the day that an invitation is issued to your protagonist to go on a journey, or it’s the day that life as we know it is going to change forever. The protagonist may not know it yet, but they can never go back from this moment.

There’s a very important lesson that I learned in studying writing and taking courses myself about the inciting incident. It cannot happen too early. I’m going to repeat that again. It cannot happen too early. I used to be really tempted to want to get into the story right away, like let's just get to the day that everything changes and get on the adventure and save some pages, but that doesn't work. You know, I really owe this moment of self-realization to Brian Price, a teacher in the UCLA professional program, challenging me as a writer and saying, “Sarah-Jane, for your audience to understand that everything changes, they have to understand the way things were before.” So I want to challenge you to take the time to build your world before you initiate the day that everything changes, before you initiate that inciting incident, and when you do, the inciting incident is the invitation to go into this movie, to go into the story. For the audience it’s the moment we sort of sit forward in our chair and we say, “Okay, we're getting going now. This is what this movie’s about.” No inciting incident, no story. No film!

When I was a little kid and I would read a lot of stories, or when my dad would read to me, I became acutely aware that we have to be invited as an audience into the journey. We have to be invited into the romance. We have to be invited into the sports competition. Whatever the story is, if we don't receive an invitation to join that world, we’ll always be on the outside looking in. The inciting incident is the moment where we realize alongside the protagonist that we’re now part of the storybook world, and we want to know more. So I think I realized this when I became really hungry for finding good stories, and chasing down books that were as good as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. What an inciting incident! You find a ring of power. A wizard tells you, “Hey, you have to come with me and be part of a fellowship and return it to Mordor.” I mean, it doesn't really get much better than that. I don't know if I'll ever be able to build an inciting incident that has that much drive and force, but I can guarantee you that every great story that you see on screen and every great story that you read in a book is going to have that moment where the quest comes to invite the character and the audience on a journey. That's why the inciting incident matters.

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