We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series. You now know what the inciting incident is. You know what it must do. So, let’s wrap up this series by talking about what goes wrong—and how to get it right in your manuscript.
The Four Biggest Mistakes Writers Make with the Inciting Incident
Mistake #1: Confusing the Hook with the Inciting Incident
This is one of the most common mistakes I see, and, honestly, it’s an easy one to make. Your opening scene is dramatic. It grabs the reader by the throat. Surely that’s the inciting incident, right?
Not necessarily.
The hook is the moment that makes your reader want to keep reading. The inciting incident is the event that launches the main story. Sometimes they’re the same moment. Often, they’re not.
Here’s the difference: A hook creates intrigue. An inciting incident creates a problem the protagonist must spend the rest of the book solving.
Think of it this way: Your hook is the bait. Your inciting incident is the hook that sets in the fish’s mouth. One draws attention. The other changes everything.
Mistake #2: Making It Internal Instead of an Event
Remember our first rule from Part 1? The inciting incident must be an event—a thing that happens. Not a thought. Not a feeling. Not a realization.
I see this one a lot, such as:
- a character wakes up and decides she’s tired of her life.
- She realizes her marriage is failing.
- He remembers something from his past and feels unsettled.
None of those are inciting incidents. They might be important character moments, but they don’t create the kind of external, measurable disruption that forces the story into motion. A character can sit with a decision, a realization, or a memory indefinitely. But when something happens—when a concrete, external event lands on the page and the character has no choice but to respond—that is what launches a story.
Mistake #3: Burying It Too Deep
Your reader is patient. But not that patient.
If you spend five chapters building your character’s ordinary world before anything disrupts it, you’ve lost your window. Backstory is important. Setup is important. But the inciting incident needs to land early—and frankly, the earlier the better.
That doesn’t mean you can’t establish your character first. You absolutely should. But the disruption needs to come while the reader still has momentum. If you’ve given us pages and pages of normal life without a hint of the earthquake to come, the reader has already set the book down.
Mistake #4: Writing a Reversible Moment
This one is sneaky because the moment might feel dramatic. But ask yourself this question: Can my character walk away from this and go back to normal?
If the answer is yes, it’s not an inciting incident. It’s just a bad day.
A true inciting incident is irreversible. The character cannot unsee, unhear, unexperience what just happened. Their ordinary world has cracked open, and there is no gluing it back together. If your character could shrug it off—if there’s a reasonable path back to the status quo—then the stakes aren’t high enough and the disruption isn’t real.
How to Get It Right
Now that we’ve talked about what not to do, let’s look at examples of how to do it right. I’ve chosen four of my books that show you how to nail the inciting incident.
Life Flight—Don’t Bury It. Drop It on Page One.
In Life Flight, EMS helicopter pilot Penny Carlton’s chopper crash-lands on a mountain during a raging storm with a critical patient on board and a serial killer loose in the area. This happens immediately. There is no slow build, no leisurely tour of Penny’s ordinary world. I wanted the story to detonate from the first page. The ordinary world is shattered before you’ve even settled into your reading chair, and from that moment on, Penny’s life is in danger and the story is barreling forward.
This is how you avoid Mistake #3. Get to it. Trust that you can layer in backstory and character development after the earthquake hits. Your readers will follow you anywhere once the ground is shaking.
Double Take—Know the Difference Between the Hook and the Inciting Incident.
Double Take opens with a prologue. Lainie’s fiancé Adam points a gun at her and tries to kill her. She fights back and shoots him. It’s gripping and, hopefully, impossible to put down. That’s the hook.
But it’s not the inciting incident.
The main story launches eighteen months later, when Adam—the man Lainie knows she killed—appears to be alive and stalking her again. That is the event that disrupts her rebuilt life and sets the central conflict in motion. The prologue draws you in. Adam’s impossible reappearance is what launches the story.
The hook makes you need to know what happens. The inciting incident tells you what the rest of the book is actually about.
Serial Burn—Make It External, Concrete, and Undeniable.
Jesslyn McCormick has spent her career in fire investigation because of a personal tragedy. A fire killed her family when she was seven years old. That wound has shaped everything about her life. But her pain, her desire for answers, and her years of searching are internal. They’re character. They’re motivation. They are not the inciting incident.
The inciting incident is the fire at her church.
When Jesslyn is called to investigate an arson at her own church and evidence begins connecting it to the fire that destroyed her family two decades ago, that is the external, concrete event that disrupts her world and launches the main story. I don’t let the character’s internal longing do the heavy lifting. I give the reader the fire. Something that demands investigation, action, and response.
This is the antidote to Mistake #2. Internal motivation is essential for great characters, but it cannot replace the moment when something happens.
Final Approach—Make It Irreversible.
Air Marshal Kristine Duncan is on a plane headed for vacation when a hijacker attempts to take control of the aircraft. She and FBI Special Agent Andrew Ross act fast and get the plane safely on the ground, and they do that like the experts they are. Crisis averted, right? Nope. The investigation that follows reveals layers of deception, conspiracy, and personal reckoning that neither of them saw coming.
The hijacking attempt is the inciting incident, and it is completely irreversible. Kristine can’t unlive it. She can’t pretend it didn’t happen. And the deeper she and Andrew dig into why it happened, the more dangerous and tangled things become. There is no path back to the vacation she planned, and there is no version of her life that isn’t permanently altered by what took place on that plane.
This is how you avoid Mistake #4. Make the moment so seismic that walking away isn’t an option.
Check Your Work
So, here’s your homework. Go back to your work in progress and find your inciting incident. Then stress-test it against these four questions:
- Is it the inciting incident, or just the hook? Does this moment create intrigue, or does it create the central problem of the story?
- Is it an event or an internal moment? Does something happen on the page, or is your character just thinking and feeling?
- Does it land early enough? Are readers still engaged when the disruption hits, or have you buried it under too much setup?
- Is it irreversible? Can your character walk away from this and go back to normal life? If so, you need a bigger earthquake.
If your inciting incident passes all four tests, you’re in great shape. If it doesn’t, now you know exactly where to dig in and make it stronger.
This wraps up my three-part series on the inciting incident. Remember that this single moment is the foundation your entire story is built on. Get it right, and everything that follows—conflict, stakes, transformation, resolution—has solid ground to stand on. Get it wrong, and even beautiful prose and compelling characters won’t be enough to hold the story together.
Now …
… go write your earthquake.
