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

Is It Done Yet? - Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts I’m doing based on a presentation I made at the Las Vegas Writers Conference in May of this year focused on how to know when your manuscript is ready to query. 

Part 1 – The Goal: A Fully-Realized Novel

Knowing when your manuscript is ready is a topic that comes up quite regularly in many writers’ groups both online and off. Most of the time, the usual advice gets offered: it’s done when you can’t stand working on it anymore; it’s done when all you can revise is punctuation; it’s done when you think it is; it’s done when your beta readers tell you it is; it’s done when you’ve done x number of revisions; it’s done when you don’t know what else to do with it.

All of these responses miss the mark because the question being asked is: when is my novel ready to query? Underneath that question is the real one: how do I know my novel will attract interest from an agent?

My answer, based on my work as a developmental/ content editor, and several years reading and editing submissions for a literary agent, is a bit more complex and based on both the writer’s understanding of their work and the demands of the publishing marketplace.

Reading for the literary agent taught me a lot. Mostly, it taught me that the vast majority of manuscripts being queried weren’t ready yet. They needed at least another revision to become what I call a fully realized novel.

A fully realized novel is one in which all the novel’s elements work together to create the dynamic forward movement that propels the characters (and the reader) from the first word to the last in a satisfying and unified manner. There is a clear and well-defined premise or central question that organizes the plot, characters, theme, setting, relevant details, structure, information flow, and sequence of scenes. In a fully realized novel, everything that is on the page is relevant and necessary to create the overall effect of the work. The overall effect of the novel is vastly greater than the sum of the individual parts. 

A movie I think does a near-perfect job demonstrating what fully realized storytelling looks like (and I’m using a movie here because they create a complete story arc in roughly two hours) is EverAfter, the Drew Barrymore and Angelica Houston retelling of Cinderella.

What I love about this movie is that nearly everything, from the costuming to set design to dialogue has an arc with a purpose and a payoff.

For example, the line, “You have been born to wealth and privilege and with that comes specific obligations” is spoken three times. First by the Queen of France and then Danielle (the Cinderella character) to Prince Henry, and lastly by the Prince himself. Each time, the line changes in meaning and it effectively shows Henry’s growth from the errant prince attempting to shirk his responsibilities, to realizing the opportunities his position might afford for helping others, to a belligerent response after Danielle’s identity as a commoner is revealed at the ball and embarrasses the prince in front of his subjects and father (in response to which, Leonardo DaVinci, this movie’s fairy godmother, says, “Hogwash” and tells the prince to get over himself; if that's truly what he believes, he doesn't deserve Danielle).

Similarly, a distinctive ruby and pearl necklace provides a subtle detail that has significant payoff. One of the royal pages took the necklace from the queen’s bedroom and gives it to the stepmother so that a meeting can be engineered for the older daughter, Marguerite, and the queen. After church, Marguerite “returns” the necklace to the queen saying it must have fallen off while she was inside. The queen rewards Marguerite’s honesty by inviting mother and daughter to the palace for a chat. At the end of the movie, when Danielle is presented to her family as the prince’s wife, she’s wearing that necklace. No mention is made of it, but the arc of that small detail is clear. In addition, there’s an earlier scene in which the baroness is buying a broach with the intention that Marguerite wear it to attract the prince’s attention. She keeps telling the seller that it needs to be bigger, to which he says, “I fear if it were any larger, she might tip over.” These are two instances where the details that are called specifically to the viewer’s attention have significance and meaning.

A fully realized novel provides the same sense of purpose, arc, and payoff for all its elements. Every scene carries a sense of the underlying premise or question, every detail relates to it, every plot point builds toward the payoff. 

A great test for whether the novel is fully realized is how easily you can write your query letter or create an elevator pitch for your novel. I think many writers struggle with their queries because their stories haven’t coalesced around a central focus that drives the narrative forward, and this is mainly a result of not pushing past the initial stages of revision to the place where the story, that connective tissue that creates relevance and unifies the narrative, emerges and becomes clear.

In Part 2, I talk about knowing your genre as an important first step in the revision process. 

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