What's up my friend? Abbie here, and welcome back to WritersLife
Wednesdays, where we come together to help you make your story matter and make your author
dreams come true. Today's video is part two of the video that
I did last week about writing an amazing, gripping inciting incident that will grab
your reader's attention and pull them into your story. So go watch part one if you haven't seen it
already. We debunk some of the myths about the inciting
incident, just break down what the inciting incident actually is, how to write an amazing,
gripping inciting incident, and I gave you guys some prompts, some questions to ask yourselves
to get your creative juices flowing about your story, make your story opening the strongest
it can possibly be. Today we are doing a case study of the inciting
incident with example stories. Usually I do the example story case study
thing right within the first video or just all in one video, but I'm trying something
a little bit different because the inciting incident is such a big important topic to
cover, I don't have time to do it all in one video. We're going to be looking at two story examples
today. One's a good example, one's a bad example. We're going to look at what works, what doesn't. Plus, I'm going to show you a story that proves
you don't need your inciting incident to be some big, epic, crazy call to adventure. In fact, it can be as simple and seemingly
insignificant as the task of cleaning up your backyard. Why does your story matter? Good question. What if I told you that there's a science
behind every great story? I don't just teach you how to write, I teach
you how to change the world with your story and make your author dreams come true. Okay, so even if you did watch that first
video, let's recap and refresh our minds about the basic principles of writing an amazing
inciting incident. The inciting incident isn't just the first
big thing that happens, rather, it's the external event that pushes your protagonist outside
their comfort zone. Knowing the protagonist and understanding
her comfort zone is the only thing that makes us see the importance of the inciting incident. Because you've already introduced us to the
protagonist's internal conflict in the hook, the reader can now see how this whole situation
is going to be especially painful for her to navigate. The impossible choice is what piques our curiosity
and keeps us reading. If you don't give your protagonist a choice
to make and show us why this choice is so important to them, your protagonist becomes
a punching bag for the plot and your story becomes predictable. Remember, your protagonist's misbelief has
been quietly growing stronger for a long time now, which means when something pushes her
outside her comfort zone, she's primed to make a decision based on that misbelief. Okay, so now we're going to take these guidelines
and case study some real stories. More specifically, Divergent versus The Greatest
Showman. If you've been here for a while, you know
exactly how feel about both of these stories, and if you're new around here, this should
be a fun little surprise. Let's only look at the inciting incidents
of these stories and ask ourselves the same questions that I gave you in last week's video. First, let's case study Divergent. I wish I could just ignore the non-hook hook
that just info dumps a ton of world-building on us without showing us why any of it matters
to the protagonist, but I can't. Because as we talked about in the hook video,
those first few moments are not only crucial for grabbing our attention, but they're crucial
for showing us, laying out the foundation of who this protagonist is, their internal
conflict, which is the yardstick by which we're going to measure the importance of everything
that happens. In Divergent, the book and the movie, we don't
really learn anything about our protagonist, Tris. We just learn that she's a girl living in
dystopian Chicago where everyone is sorted into factions based on their major personality
traits. At the age of 16, everyone has to take a test
that will allegedly tell them where they belong in society. No, it's not the Myers-Briggs test, even though
that would probably work just as well as this serum-induced mind frick. The inciting incident is when Tris takes the
test and gets spooky, inconclusive results, which leads to confusion on the day she has
to choose her faction. I have absolutely no problem with that external
conflict. It's a little cliche maybe, but that's just
your typical dystopian plot. The problem here is not the external conflict,
it's the internal conflict, or the lack thereof. What is Tris's internal conflict? What is she afraid of? What does she desire or think will bring her
true happiness? What is her misbelief, and where did it come
from? At one point she says ... I'm scared it'll tell me I'm not at Abnegation,
that I have to leave my family, but I'm even more scared that it'll tell me to stay. But that only tells me that she doesn't know
what she wants. She just knows that ... Everyone knows where they belong, except for
me. But why is it important for her to fit in? At the beginning of the story she doesn't
even know that Divergents are dangerous and therefore get hunted down and killed by Kate
Winslet. So she has virtually nothing to be afraid
of yet, and apparently nothing to desire. She kind of doesn't want to leave her parents,
but shows exactly zero remorse when she makes the decision to defect and never see her parents
again. But that's the first plot point, so let's
circle back to the inciting incident and ask ourselves the questions from part one. Why does this inciting incident matter to
the protagonist? How does it push her outside her comfort zone? I actually have no idea why it matters to
Tris. We don't get to know anything about her internal
conflict before she takes the test, which means we're just experiencing these external
events as if they're happening to us. Our mirror neurons are firing, but we're not
empathizing with her unique struggle, and because there was no comfort zone previously
determined, I can't really say how this pushes her outside her comfort zone. We don't know what her comfort zone is because
we don't know what her fear is, or the rooted misbelief that created this fear. What internal conflict is going to arise for
the protagonist in wake of the inciting incident? After her test, Tris is perplexed and doesn't
tell anyone what happened because she was ordered not to. But this turn of events doesn't raise the
stakes or change anything for Tris right now. She still doesn't know what faction to choose
and doesn't express much of a desire to be in any of them, save her hint of unexplained
attraction to Dauntless. What is the impossible choice? The protagonist must be faced with these options,
stay inside their comfort zone and risk never getting what they desire, or venture into
the unknown and accomplish their goal while still avoiding their fear. Now, here is where most writers would be like,
"Aha, she has to choose what faction she's going to belong to. There's the choice," and yes, she does. In fact, this choosing ceremony is like the
biggest deal ever in dystopian Chicago, but the impossible choice I'm talking about isn't
a choice between five factions. It's the choice between these two options,
stay inside my comfort zone and risk never getting what I desire or venture into the
unknown and accomplish my goal while still avoiding my fear. Tris doesn't face this impossible choice simply
because we don't know what her comfort zone is, we don't know what her desire or goal
is, and we don't know what her fear is or how it's rooted in her misbelief. See why I stress the importance of getting
to know your protagonist first? It's what makes the inciting incident matter,
not only to the protagonist but to you, as the reader. Because we don't see Tris's internal conflict
at the beginning, the inciting incident is just a thing happening to a random person. It's plot driven, not character driven, and
it misses the opportunity to grab our attention and make us care about what's happening. The rest of the story unfolds in a predictable
sequence of external event after external event, all of them trying to evoke some kind
of emotion but failing, simply because we were never given the measuring tape of internal
conflict to show us why what happens to Tris matters to Tris. So now let's move on, shall we, to a much
better example of an inciting incident, and that is of course, The Greatest Showman. Yes, I realize that they rewrote history quite
a bit for the sake of this movie, but you have to admit it was a damn good rewrite. The hook wastes no time and showing us what
P.T. Barnum wants, to do something spectacular
with his life and to be successful. He's a boy with a million dreams, but reality
is standing in the way of him being who he wants to be. Reality is he has nothing, and after years
of struggling to make ends meet, he still has nothing, a fact his father-in-law unhelpfully
rubs his nose in. She'll be back. Sooner or later she'll tire of your life of
having nothing. Barnum marries his one true love anyway, hoping
life will get better and hoping that one day he will be the success he's always wanted
to be. The inciting incident steps in when, a few
years later, Barnum is laid off along with everyone else in this gloomy looking office. Let's pause here and ask ourselves the same
questions about this inciting incident and see what we learned. Why does this inciting incident matter to
the protagonist? How does it push him outside his comfort zone? We've already learned about Barnum's desire,
fear and misbelief in the opening of the story. He desires to do something spectacularly successful,
but reality and his future father-in-law slaps him in the face and tells him that he will
never be anything more than what he is, which is poor, unsuccessful, and in his eyes, not
good enough. That created the fear of failure and poverty,
which is based on a misbelief that you are only happy if you're successful and you're
only successful if you are wealthy, popular and admired by everyone. Getting fired from his job pushes Barnum outside
his comfort zone because ultimately he wants to give his family the kind of life he dreams
of. Not that he was giving them that kind of life
before he got fired, but we can see how dissatisfied he is with his life and we know why the comfort
zone has been drawn because we know what lies outside his comfort zone, fear of failure. What internal conflict is going to arise for
the protagonist in wake of the inciting incident? Since internal conflict is really desire versus
fear, you can probably see Barnum's internal conflict right away. No job means staring his idea of failure in
the face, but he still has the burning desire to make his million dreams come true, and
no job could also mean the opportunity to try something new. What is the impossible choice? Your protagonist must be faced with these
options, stay inside their comfort zone and risk never getting what they desire or venture
into the unknown and accomplish their goal while still avoiding their fear. Barnum could stay inside his comfort zone
and not risk greater failure. He could get another depressing job like this
one and continue to make ends meet, but that would mean never getting what he desires. His other option is to venture into the unknown
and try to accomplish his ultimate goal, but it's risky and he could lose everything. But because the pain of continuing down the
same road of barely scraping by is far greater than the pain of potentially losing this gamble
with the circus thing, he decides to try the circus thing, because like we briefly discussed
last week, our brain makes decisions based on pain. Okay? Avoiding pain, avoiding the greatest pain,
pain versus pain. We're going to dig more into that in next
week's video, not next week's, but the week after next week I think, when we talk about
the first plot point. Now, do you see what I mean about making your
inciting incident matter to your protagonist and matter to your reader? Before we wrap this case study up, I want
to show you one more example. This is for all of my contemporary writers
out there. See, when a lot of writers look at the 3-act
story structure, at first it's sometimes seems like it is more suited to a fantasy story
or a sci-fi, or at least a really adventurous story. In some 3-act story structures, you might
even see the inciting incident labeled as the call to adventure, which just conjures
all these images of like this big, crazy external event crashing into your protagonist's life
to call them to their destiny. But what about when you're writing a contemporary
and there's no adventure to be called to, there's nothing adventurous going on? No worries, you can still write a super compelling
inciting incident. I'm obsessed with small-scale stories for
this reason. I love seeing writers take a scenario where
nothing seems to be happening, yet you're so drawn into the character's story that you
can't look away. One such story like this is the film, This
Beautiful Fantastic. Oh my gosh, I've been so wanting to use this
story as an example for a long time, but I've been refraining from it because I know it's
not that well known, which is tragic by the way, because it's so good. I love everything about this story. Not only is the protagonist super freaking
relatable, to me anyway, but the most fascinating thing about this story is how really not much
happens. Bella Brown, a reclusive London writer, is
obsessed with order and cleanliness and she hates going outside, mostly because it's not
orderly and not clean. As a result, her house is adorable, but her
backyard, not so much. Bella's inciting incident shows up when her
landlord comes over and tells her that if she doesn't get her yard cleaned up on the
double, she's going to be evicted. That's literally the inciting incident, she
has to clean up her yard. I freaking love this because it is such a
small and seemingly insignificant task that most people don't even think about, but to
Bella, it's the most outside her comfort zone thing that could happen to her. We understand why it freaks her out so much
because we first get to know who she is as a person, not with a lot of exposition or
explanation, but just by observing her habits and knowing some of her backstory. So no, you don't have to have some crazy,
epic call to adventure to upend your protagonist's comfort zone. In fact, you're inciting incident could be
something that most people look at as just a boring everyday task. Okay, boom. That's it for today's case study. Comment below and tell me what are some of
your favorite examples of inciting incidents that matter to the characters. Be sure to grab the 3-act story structure
template, it is linked in the description box below, and stick around because not next
week but the week after that we're going to be breaking down the first plot point. Okay? That's the next story beat and that's going
to be when your protagonist makes the impossible choice, which determines what happens next. We're also going to explore how the human
brain makes difficult decisions, and if you're from the future, that video will be linked
right here. Smash that like button if you liked this video
and be sure to subscribe to this channel if you haven't already, because I post writing
videos and publishing videos every single Wednesday and I would love to have you here
in the community. Also, be sure to check out my Patreon, because
that's where we go beyond videos and take storytelling to the next level. The Patreon community is not only the best
way to support what I'm doing here on YouTube, but it's also the only way to connect personally
with me and get better guidance on your story. Got to Patreon.com/AbbieEmmons and check out
all the awesome extra content that I've made for you. Until next week, my friend, rock on. In some 3-act story structures ... story structures. Which just conjures all these images of like
some mystical force exploding. What? Now, we're going to rip some stories apart. It's my favorite thing to do, maybe even more
than writing.
