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

My Novel is a Jerk

I first became aware that my novel had achieved a form of sentience a few years ago when we were in the midst of a disagreement about the sequence of certain scenes. Every time I sat down to write, I was dimly aware of a tug-of-war going on between what I, the conscious-brain in charge of the physical act of writing, and the novel, the subconscious-brain in charge of the mental act of writing, about what the next scene should be. It made for some seemingly unproductive writing days with little achieved by me staring at the computer screen.

Things came to a head while I was explaining the problem to my husband one morning. In the middle of my explanation, I suddenly turned to my right and said, as if addressing another person, "No, we're not going to do that" then turned back to my husband whose amused expression clued me in on what I'd just done and that the novel had, in fact, "said" something to me. Remember that the right brain is in charge of intuitive, holistic, symbolic thought, and maybe I seem a little less crazy (my husband, bless him, took the whole thing in stride -- apparently, I've been doing things like this for awhile, just not aware that I was).

Like most writers, I am used to characters "talking" to me -- becoming so deeply aware of them that they feel like real people who have an internal logic so complete their dialogue has a particular cadence and vocabulary, their actions and physicality have an individuality to them, and they have an ability to surprise me by doing something my conscious writer-brain hadn't planned on. But, until that moment with my husband, I wasn't aware that novels, as an entity, had the potential for doing the same thing.

I suppose I should have anticipated it. The same dynamics that cause characters to come to life are at work in the novel as a whole, and I've been working on this story and with this narrator, in some form or other, for over a decade. The past three years have been immersive -- it's the only thing I am writing, and I work on it every single day. So I shouldn't be surprised that my novel would develop a personality, but I am. And I am most surprised that that personality is, well....kind of a jerk, actually.

As I said, for the past three years, this novel is the only thing I have worked on, which was not necessarily by choice. This novel is a jealous novel that didn't give me the brain space to be able to think about other stories or even do much reading. Which would be fine, except for the fact that this novel will occasionally just shut down on me for no apparent reason. I'm familiar enough with my own process to recognize procrastination, avoidance, and fear-induced creative paralysis pretty quickly, but this novel sometimes seemed to just....go away. I'd lose the narrator's voice, lose track of details and themes, lose the forward momentum, spend hours, DAYS even, just staring at the computer and being rewarded with a single sentence.

And then, when I would finally say, "Okay, I give up. I'm going to go work on something else!" BANG, the novel would be back. Almost like it was saying, "Wait, don't go, I was only kidding!" It's been a bit like being in an emotionally manipulative relationship with the fact that all of this is being generated from within my own head -- yes, I am the one who's doing this to myself -- added in just for fun.

I suppose it's not too much of a mystery why my novel behaves like this -- my first person, present tense narrator is an emotionally shut down 17-year old boy with an eidetic memory, who is trying to come to terms with the extreme grief caused by the death of his older brother in a car accident, a car accident he caused and can't remember. It's a difficult narrative voice to hold on to -- he is unaware of so many things that have to be made clear to the reader before they become clear to him (as an aside: several years ago, while this was still a short story, a workshop leader tried to convince me to switch it to third person/past tense for just this reason. First person/present tense compresses what the narrator (and reader who's seeing the world through the narrator's eyes) can know and the amount of perspective he or she has on the events of the novel. Third/past gives you distance and perspective, and makes it easier to generate the tension and forward momentum needed to keep the story moving. While I'm happy I ignored the advice, I do recognize how much easier my life would have been if I had followed it).

All of this is why, though I wrote back at the beginning of November that I was nearly the end of the novel, I am still working on it at the end of January. The novel simply shut down again in December right after I completed the draft and started editing. I cajoled, I wheedled, I took hold of it with a firm hand and started getting up at 4 in the morning (which usually works), but nothing. I've gotten a few dribbles. A scene. A paragraph.

So I signed up for a friend's novel writing bootcamp to start work on the novel I was working on when What You'll Know Tomorrow decided it was no longer content to be a short story or novella, declared itself a novel, and told me I was going to be working on it and nothing else until it was done (I guess I shouldn't be surprised the novel talks to me, it's been doing it since the beginning, but really, I didn't realize we'd started out like this until I wrote those words). I figured, WYKT would get jealous and come running back to me, arms waving, yelling, "Wait....don't leave me!"
At "worst" I'd end up with a chunk of a first draft completed for my next novel, at best, I'd end up with a finished novel and a good start on the next one.

Two weeks into the bootcamp, I've yet to get anything written on the new novel, but WYKT is picking up steam quite nicely, thank you, very much, and I'm now about 30 pages from finishing my final edits.

Which probably means I'll be done sometime in June.

Writing by Firelight (or trying to at least)

Quick synopsis: there's a writing metaphor and some agent advice in this post.

Yesterday was the first full day of Operation: Get the Novel Finished. I am staying in a lovely cottage on the Scottish coast near Banff until the end of October. It is beautiful and, above all, quiet. As many of you know, the past year has been a challenging and frustrating one for my writing. Getting my older son through his senior year of high school and all the attendant anxiety about college admissions as well as the first year of homeschooling my younger son, created a huge challenge to finding time to write.

Added to that was a change in the flight path of the airplanes that land at SFO. After more than a decade of living near the airport without problems, the FAA changed the buffer zone for departing flights and suddenly we went from one or two airplanes flying over our town each week to more than a hundred A DAY flying almost directly over our house. When we bought our house over a decade ago, one of my concerns was the proximity to the airport, but we were assured that the planes rarely come over the town, and that held true until the FAA changed the rules two years ago. And the planes are LOUD - our town is built against a granite mountain and is a perfect bowl shape, so the sound ECHOES and the house vibrates. And when SFO gets backed up or there are flight delays in other parts of the country, the planes go overhead as often as every three minutes for more than an hour. They start at 6 in the morning and continue until after midnight. They interrupt the flow of my thoughts so completely, it is like getting a phone call every three minutes while trying to write. Plus the anxiety of never knowing if each day is going to be mildly distracting or, when I sit down to write, it's going to be an every-three-minutes kind of day. Forget about being able to write in my preferred environment - total silence - at a minimum, I have had to wear noise cancelling headphones while I write. And forget about listening to my preferred choice in writing music (Yo-Yo Ma's cello concertos), the only thing that keeps me from hearing the planes is the constant drone of white or pink noise. Sometimes it's bad enough that I have to use ear plugs with the headphones.

And added to ALL that, was the pressure of having an agent who wants to see the novel when it is done. You may remember that I met Jeff Kleinman, head of Folio Literary Management, at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers workshop last summer. What I didn't write about was that we hit it off really well. Folio has been at the top of my list since I started looking for an agent, so I was thrilled to send him the novel after the workshop. Though he liked it and me and had some lovely things to say about my abilities as a writer, he also had some problems with the novel and decided to pass. However, he told me that if I wanted to revise it, he would love to take a look at it again. Because he'd put his finger on some things that had started to bother me about the novel's structure, I told him that I was going to stop querying and take some time to rework the book, and that I would, when it was finished, take him up on the offer to look at it again. He wrote back almost immediately and said, "Great. Here's where we start: define your premise." Thus began a back and forth between us that lasted for a few months while I struggled to define what my book was about, finally realizing that, since I couldn't articulate it clearly, succinctly and in a few sentences, that the premise wasn't as well-defined as I'd hoped. I finally realized that I was going to have to take some time to rethink the novel. All while one of my dream agents was waiting to read it and the airplanes were flying overhead and kid #1 was facing burnout from 12 years of constant education and taking 4 AP classes and having to get applications in on time, and kid #2 was needing me to create a curriculum and oversee his education and stressing about whether we had done the right thing (we have, he's much happier AND getting a better education), and I was frantically trying to give the novel the space it needed while constantly looking at the calendar and thinking, COME ON ALREADY!

Anyway, long story short (I am a novelist, this is how I roll): back in January, I finally figured out what I needed to do with the novel (I'd been concentrating on the wrong character's story which resulted in almost zero tension or risk to the narrator who is the main character - not good) and was able to get back to work. I spent four months reworking the first chapter until I felt it was solid. Then I went to Lit Camp, where Janis Cooke-Newman declared that it was a near-perfect first chapter. That was when I knew I was ready to contact Jeff, tell him what I was doing, and send him the pages. I'd gotten the book to a place where I was happy with it. No matter what he said, this was the direction I was going to be pursuing. Fortunately, Jeff LOVED the new direction. "Are you done?" he asked. No, I said, but I knew where I was going, had it pretty much mapped out, and expected to be finished by the end of October. "Great!" he replied. "Send it to me when it's finished! Can't wait to read it!" (he really does use all those exclamation points).

(Incidentally, if you got to my blog by searching for Folio or Jeff, and are thinking about querying him, you should know 1) he responds VERY QUICKLY (sometimes in a matter of hours, and at all times of the day (I know someone who got a rejection from him within 2 hours on a Sunday evening after 11 pm East Coast time) - the way I knew I'd hooked him with the new first chapter was that it took him a couple of days to get back to me - if you're going to query him, make sure your premise is ROCK SOLID before you send it, and 2) he can be brutally blunt - when we were going back and forth over my attempts to write a premise statement, he pretty much told me that one of them completely sucked. If you can't take that kind of bald-faced, not sugar-coated-in-any-way feedback (and several people at Squaw couldn't), he is not the agent for you.)

A few days after Lit Camp kid #1 and I got on an airplane and flew to Aberdeen, Scotland, so he could check out the university because he'd applied and gotten accepted and wanted to know if he could actually be okay going to school so far from home. Both of us fell in love. Him with the school (it was founded in 1495, if that doesn't get you excited as a history major, nothing will) and me with Scotland (again). I'd spent a week here when I was in college - Edinburgh, Inverness, Glasgow - and loved the country and (now) how quiet it was. So when kid #1 decided he was going to choose the University of Aberdeen and our family decided to take a couple of weeks before term started in September to do a family vacation in the UK, I also decided to find myself a quiet little cottage and spend the month of October finishing up the novel without any distractions (and also to be available in case kid #1 ran into any emergencies in his first month of school (he has Type-1 diabetes and felt more comfortable about his choice of schools if I stayed longer) - it's much less expensive than having to purchase a last-minute airplane ticket and fly 18 hours to get to him).

So here I am. Living in a cottage for the next month in the midst of 500 acres of Scottish farm country with nothing to do except finish the novel. It is quiet and peaceful and the Scottish countryside is one of those places my soul calls home.

Yesterday was my first day even looking at the novel in over a month. Planning our trip and kid #1's departure for college, coordinating all the details of flat rentals and car rentals and who wanted to see what and making sure the mail got held while we were gone, etc etc etc felt like I was planning troop movements rather than a vacation and took up all the available creative space in my brain.

It turned out, the break was a good one. It gave me some perspective, so that when I read through what I've written so far, I could see it with fresh eyes, see what was actually on the page rather than what I'd wanted to do or thought I was doing. And, most importantly, see that it was working.

But then it was time to start writing again. That was a bit of rough going and it took some time yesterday for the words to start coming back. However, I found a metaphor to help explain the process!

The cottage has a coal-burning multi-fuel stove for heat, and I've been trying to figure out how to use it. I can build wood-burning fires without a problem. Fireplace or stove, doesn't matter. I know how to burn wood. Coal is a different matter, I found, and requires a different set of tools - I haven't figured it out yet, but I'll get there. The metaphor, though, is about what it takes to build a fire, and is very much what this writing retreat feels like.

To build a good fire, you start out with a super-quick burning material, like newspaper, and a quick-burning material, like small twigs or a firelighter stick. But you can't build a fire with just those materials because they burn too quickly and will smother if you try to put something larger on top of them. So you need a medium-burning material, like branches that are about an inch or so thick. You need these because they will catch fire from the burning of the kindling and paper, but aren't heavy enough to smother the flame or cut off the flow of oxygen. Because fire is also all about how much oxygen is getting into the mix. Too much and the flame will go out or burn too fast too early and consume all your quick-burning materials before anything else catches. Not enough, and the fire will smother and go out. Once you've got the fire going, you can start adding the heavier, slower-burning materials - like logs or coal. These are the pieces that are going to make the fire burn hotter and longer, the ones that will really keep the fire going, but you can't start out with them. They are too big to catch fire just by holding a match against them. Go ahead and try it. Even if a log is completely dry, the most you'll do is singe it.

As I struggled yesterday, I realized that trying to get that fire started was exactly what I was doing with the writing after being away from it for so long. I couldn't just jump right in and expect to blaze away for several hours (that's not the phase of writing the novel is in anyway), I needed the quick-burning materials (like this blog or my journal) to get the words flowing, and I needed the medium-burning fuel to build a base so that I could get to the days I know are coming, the days when I will spend eight hours straight in front of the computer and still come back for more.

Building the writing was exactly like building a fire. I wrote the invocation to the muse that had come to me in the middle of the night, then I opened the novel document and wrote a sentence. Then there was nothing. Then a few words. An hour later I had a paragraph. By the end of the day I had nearly two pages.

Not bad for a first day. And now...onward.