This Changes Everything

Five steps to approach writing your story's inciting incident.

- RAN WALKER

Years ago, when I first began studying plot structures, I came across the Freytag Plot Pyramid, triangular structure that contained five elements: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement. Suddenly aware of this structure, I began to notice it in various books and films I enjoyed. I even noticed its usage in many of the comedies I watched. The first time I saw the movie Friday, I marveled at how seamlessly I was able to learn the backgrounds of the characters, as well as their motivations, within the first few minutes of the film, each of the elements of Freytag's Plot Pyramid falling neatly into place. I would later come to understand that these elements are often expected by the audience, so when they are absent, a viewer or reader might say they didn't really enjoy a story or film due to a particular part of the plot that failed to measure up to their expectations, or maybe there was something about the ending that they felt just did not work.

When I began to employ this new-found (to me) plot structure in my own writing, I quickly confronted a question: How does a writer help the reader to navigate from the exposition to the rising action? At best, that's a bit of a leap to go from setting up a story to cranking up the conflict. I would later understand that this missing component of the plot pyramid was something commonly referred to as an inciting incident.