Is It Done Yet - Part 6: Destabilizing and Inciting Incidents

This is the sixth installment aimed at helping writers know when their novel is ready to query. The series is based on the presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in April of this year, "Is It Done Yet? How to Know When Your Novel is Ready to Query"

Is it Done Yet - Part 6: Destabilizing and Inciting Incidents

As I was getting ready to move to the final stage of revision, What the Reader Needs, it occurred to me that I haven’t touched on a very important aspect of What the Story Needs: The destabilizing and inciting incidents. So I’m going to do that now before moving on to the final stage of getting your manuscript ready to query.

These two moments are absolutely crucial for getting your novel moving forward, and, surprisingly, a lot of the manuscripts I edit miss them, minimize them, conflate them, or have them occur too late. If you’ve ever gotten comments that your story starts in the wrong place, chances are good you’ve misplaced either the destabilizing incident or the inciting incident.

So what are they?

The Destabilizing Incident

The destabilizing incident, as the name implies, is the thing that unbalances your main character’s world. It’s Frodo Baggins when Bilbo disappears from his birthday party in Lord of the Rings. It’s the renting of Netherfield Park in Pride and Prejudice. It’s the discovery of the direwolf pups – one for each of the Stark children – in Game of Thrones. It’s Athena telling Telemachus he needs to leave Ithaca and visit his father’s friends in the Odyssey. It’s the moment the main character’s life is interrupted by something that breaks them out of their regular routine or pattern.

Though destabilizing incidents need to be present in the story, not all of them occur onstage. In the famous opening of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the destabilizing incident has already occurred – the wife’s discovery of Count Oblonsky’s affair with the children’s governess – three days prior to the opening of the novel. The moment in which Dolly discovers the infidelity is given to the reader in retrospect, but the focus is on the upheaval (the destabilization) this discovery creates from the first sentence.

Whether it occurs onstage or off, the destabilizing incident almost always occurs within the first few pages, even better (for contemporary fiction) if it occurs on page one. I’ve referred before to the opening pages of The Hunger Games and urge you to take a look at it.

Collins opens the book with about 300 words of Katniss Everdeen’s regular life – the poverty, Katniss’s cold life-or-death pragmatism, the restrictions of the society in which she lives. There’s also the sense of something unsettling about to occur. In the very first paragraph, which is three sentences long, Collins references the bad dreams Katniss’s sister has been having: “Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.” Collins doesn’t tell you what “the reaping” is until later, but, importantly, she conveys the sense this thing makes this day different even as Katniss goes about her regular routine of meeting Gale in the forest to hunt.

An effective destabilizing incident really has two components – the ordinary world the main character exists in, and the event that upends the ordinary world.

The destabilizing incident is important to both the story and the reader.

For the story, it’s important because it sets the main character up for the inciting incident. The main character’s world is no longer routine, their awareness is heightened, possibly things no longer fit together the way they used to making the main character restless and ready for change.

For the reader, the ordinary world is the baseline that allows the reader to see the changes that occur in the main character over the course of the story. If the reader doesn’t know what’s normal or routine for the main character (not just in their external world, but also their internal one of reactions, emotions, decision making, etc.), then the reader has no understanding of the effect of the events on the main character.

The Inciting Incident

The inciting incident is that event, without which, nothing else in the story can occur.

In the Lord of the Rings, it’s Frodo picking up the One Ring (though you could also argue, it’s Bilbo giving up the Ring before he leaves the Shire). In Pride and Prejudice, it’s Elizabeth Bennett dancing with Mr. Darcy. In Game of Thrones, it’s Robert Baratheon’s arrival at Winterfell and Bran’s fall from the tower. In the Odyssey, it’s Hermes telling Calypso to let Odysseus go home. In Anna Karenina, it’s the titular character’s arrival, having shared her journey from St. Petersburg with Vronsky’s mother. And, in the Hunger Games, it’s when Prim is selected as tribute.

While the destabilizing incident can occur offstage and still be effective, the inciting incident needs to occur onstage where the reader can experience it (notice I say “experience” it – in contemporary fiction, it’s most effective if this moment is portrayed in scene, shown to the reader, rather than the reader being told about it in exposition).

The function of the inciting incident is to generate the energy needed to propel the main character (and the reader) into the story. Think of these two moments in your story as if the destabilizing incident lights the fuse on a stick of dynamite and the inciting incident is when the dynamite explodes.

But, wait, you say, your novel isn’t a thriller with explosive pacing, it’s literary fiction. Even so, even when the pacing of the novel and its focus is on more introspective and quite moments, the inciting incident is still the moment that propels the main character forward into the rest of the story. Austen’s pyrotechnics come from the verbal sparring that occurs between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy while they dance, setting up Elizabeth’s disdain for the recalcitrant Mr. Darcy and their subsequent interactions, including her willingness to believe Wickham’s story about Darcy cheating him of his birthright. The essential aspect of the inciting incident is that, without it, nothing else happens in the book, and that holds true no matter the book’s genre.

Typically, the inciting incident occurs somewhere around the 10-15% mark (in an 85,000 word novel, that would put it between 8,500 and 12,750 words or approximately between pages 25 and 40), though I’ve seen it effectively placed as late as page 50 in longer works. What’s absolutely essential is that the destabilizing incident creates tension for the reader, draws them forward with the awareness that something is about to change, and the inciting incident releases that tension in a way the propels the reader and the story forward. Both events need to be meaningful, organic to the central organizing principle of the story, and relate to the story’s climactic moment and ultimate resolution.

One of the reasons I chose to include this post in a series focused on getting your manuscript ready to query is because these two moments in your novel occur at the very beginning, the pages most likely to be read by an agent. Without them, the reader (whether it's an agent, editor, or someone who bought your book) doesn't have the sense of a story getting ready to be told. They're crucial moments, in the early pages of your novel, that can make the difference between engaging a reader and having the reader say, "No thanks."

And with that, I promise, the next installment of this series will deal with the final stage of revision: What the Reader Needs. See you next time!

If you'd like to hear more about how to use destabilizing and inciting incidents to create a dynamic opening for your novel, I'm speaking on this topic at the Thoughtful Book Festival on Friday, August 28, 2020. Please go HERE to reserve your tickets. 


If you’d like to receive a copy of my revision flow chart, please contact me at: diane.glaz@gmail.com

If you'd like more information about my editing services, please visit my website or contact me through email, Facebook, Twitter, or IG. I specialize in literary, upmarket, commercial, YA, contemporary women's, erotica, and fantasy, and have a diverse and international client base whose work has appeared on the NY Times best seller lists and Amazon top seller lists.

Twitter: @DeeGeeWriter

IG: diane.glaz

(If you follow me on IG, be forewarned: you'll see a lot of pictures of my Airedales and whisky)

Here are the links for the all the parts of this series: 

Part 1: The goal of a fully-realized novel

Part 2: Know your genre

Part 3: What the writer needs - Telling yourself the story

Part 4: What the story needs - Telling the story

Part 5: What the story (also) needs - Telling the real story

Part 6: Destabilizing and inciting incidents

Part 7: What the reader needs