Things Are Heating Up: Writing your inciting incident

Hi everybody, and welcome back to Too Many Books to Count! I’m so glad you stopped by, as we enter our final week in the month of May. Is it just me, or does every year seem to go faster than the one before it? In any case, we’re already incredibly near to the end of the month, which means on Thursday we’ll be finishing out this month’s series!

As you know, all month we’ve been talking about first drafts. But instead of looking at them like we usually do, like we writers tend to do after we’ve already written a single first draft of a book, we’re looking at it with the viewpoint of helping authors who maybe don’t really know what they’re doing when they’re writing their first draft (which, by the by, is an incredibly useful thing for even seasoned authors to do, from time to time).

Thus far, we’ve discussed everything from writing styles to discovering your protagonist and antagonist, and today, we’re getting into the meat of the matter.

Things Are Heating Up: Writing your inciting incident

Now, being that we’ve also had a topic on knowing where to start your novel, you probably have a bit of an inkling on where to begin with this already. But I’ll still ask you this question:

What’s your hook? What’s the incident that’s going to draw readers into your book, and make them never want to put the thing down?

That’s what you need to know, when you first start writing. You need to know what that incident is, and you need to write it as close to the beginning of the book as you can. If your inciting incident is in the first chapter, you get brownie points. If it’s in the first five, you’re still doing good. If it doesn’t happen until the middle of the book… well, then you’ve got some issues.

This is a time when you need to work with your outline, if you’re one of those crazy outliners. You need to have an idea of what’s going to draw readers into the story, and it needs to be one of the very first things that you write.

For Coetir, the inciting incident happened within the first couple pages. It was a death. And within the new two chapters, it flowed into an even bigger incident that really started the ball rolling within the story.

So what’s going to start your ball rolling? What’s really going to get this story started in the best way possible? What hook can you give your readers, to make sure they won’t want to put the book down?

For me, this is the best way to start a book. Start with that hook, that line, that incident that’s really going to drive your point home. Start with something that will fascinate your readers, something that will get them thinking, something that will get their hearts pounding. If you can do that, then you’re one step closer to keeping them through the whole book.

Next time, let’s talk about the final step in writing your first draft—making sure you actually finish!

[love]

{Rani Divine}