The Funnily Enough

The inciting incident is the thing that happens somewhere in the first part of a story that changes things for the main character and puts them on the path to adventure (or romance, or tragedy, or whatever).

 It’s a pretty well understood element in fiction, and even writers who aren’t aware of it will naturally work it into the story. 

However, what isn’t always as obvious is that a story has more than one inciting incident. A lot more.

How many times has something completely random happened to you? A death for which you can see no purpose? A problem that you couldn’t see a way out of that seemed to solve itself? In real life, things happen for no apparent reason.

In fiction, everything needs to happen for a reason.

Most of us at some point in our reading lives have come upon a scene where one of the characters does something so odd it doesn’t just defy expectation, it stops us cold.

We’re not pleasantly intrigued, we’re baffled—or annoyed. The dreamlike illusion we’ve enjoyed up to that point has been ruptured not in some Brechtian breach of the fourth wall, but through plain bad writing. We scratch our heads, thinking: The character just wouldn’t do that.

As writers, we don’t ever want our readers to feel that kind of disconnect—but that doesn’t mean our characters should be neatly and easily defined, either. Pushing our characters to their limits, in fact, is what makes for compelling fiction.

So how, then, can we determine the limits of what’s believable in how a character behaves?

Clearing

Give yourself space, time and attention.

Consciously set aside some non-distracted time and attention. Like any healthy relationship you have, or creative project you engage, your Creative Self needs quality time to thrive.

Make your creative self your most important client – even if that means setting official “creative self time” on your calendar.

Just like (hopefully) you wouldn’t answer an email or tweet when with a client, give your creative self the same focused attention – it needs that to be seen, heard and known to be more active and reveal its riches.

So you're writing along in your latest novel or novella, and you come to a screeching (or, at least squealing) halt. Your story seems stalled for some reason. You don't know what scene to write next.

So what do you do? I have a suggestion. I call them the two writing power questions.

Like many writers, I was interested from a very early age in the relationship between the way a story was told and what it was telling.

I liked the way the words in “Charlotte’s Web” made webs themselves, spinning out from one another, silken. As a teenager, I felt shaken by the hollow sound and empty spaces in “The Sun Also Rises,” how the novel seemed to be narrated by a dead person about dead people, which it both isn’t and is.

Thoreau said: “Writing may be either the record of a deed or a deed. It is nobler when it is a deed.” Literature for me has always been about this duality, this double happening in the story being told and in the telling.

Self-publishing has lost its stigma, and it’s the publishing path of choice for a lot of writers these days.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Or that everybody who self-publishes will succeed.

Unfortunately, I’m seeing a lot of writers dive in head first without having a clue what they’re doing. Even long-time trad-pubbed authors who think they know the ropes can make fatal errors because self-publishing has a different set of rules.

You’ve probably heard the advice about writing hot and editing cold*—write freely without censor, trying any- and everything that might work, that could lead to a wonderfully creative, dramatic, or satisfying line or passage or scene, but only edit after giving yourself some distance from the text.

The writing hot part isn’t usually too difficult, though many times we do cool ourselves down, analyzing as we write, editing as we write, rather than simply allowing wild and wonderful and hotly passionate ideas to shoot off our fingers.

But rather than giving you suggestions for writing without a censor, an inner critic, or an editing witch perched on your shoulder—which I’ve covered before—I want to focus this article on the edit cool part of the advice.

There’s no point having a story by the end of which the reader will know who your main character is and what he’s about. 

You may think that the purpose of the story is to reveal this and that’s it’s intriguing for the reader not to be too sure where a character’s loyalties lie. That would be wrong. 

Did you have a good idea of what kind of person Harry was before he got to Hogwart’s? Did you have a reasonable idea about Katniss before she got to the games? 

The initial part of a story is to tell the reader the character’s values and beliefs. Once things kick off, then it’s time to test those values and beliefs.

Many avid readers are also avid writers. It only makes sense that someone who loves the beauty of language would want to make a craft of it.

However, even the best writers get stuck from time to time, and it's always nice to get a push in the right direction. Most authors agree that the first draft is going to be horrible, but as Sylvia Plath says, "The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt."

So push through that writer's block, and get inspired by these amazing tips from famous authors. Pick up that pen, and begin writing. After all, “The scariest moment is always just before you start.” (And we hope you'd trust a quote from Stephen King).

“‘Google’ is not a synonym for ‘research’,” says novelist Dan Brown.

If you want to be a serious writer (and don’t we all?), sooner or later you’re guaranteed to hit a brick wall.

To get beyond the brick wall, you are forced to do some … (sound of ominous music) research.

The hubby and I recently returned from a (long overdue) vacation in Paris. Aside from being totally awesome, our trip to the Louvre Museum was also interesting from a writing perspective, especially for this fantasy world-building gal. Seeing artifacts from cultures thousands of years old is inspiring.

You'd think staring at one old pot after another would get old, but it was fascinating. One region used red clay, another white. One painted on the outside of the bowl, another on the inside. Some vases were tall and thin, others were wide and flat. Some even used animal shapes, like a chicken pitcher.

Me being me couldn't help but see a correlation to how to build a fantasy world.

What all of these artifacts had in common was that they were all crafted from what the cultures had nearby. Different soils, clays, flowers and minerals to make pigments, all of these things were specific and even unique to the region. That gave their art and artifacts their own flavor.

Each character in a scene needs a goal. Obviously the main character’s goal is the most important, but every character should be aiming for something, and those goals should be acted on and in doing so affect one another. 

This doesn’t just refer to the protagonist/antagonist relationship, it should be true of all characters in a scene.

Thriller writing? Mystery writing? Literary fiction? It’s all the same: Building apprehension in the minds of your readers is one of the most effective keys to engaging them early in your novel and keeping them flipping pages late into the night.

Simply put, if you don’t hook your readers, they won’t get into the story. If you don’t drive the story forward by making readers worry about your main character, they won’t have a reason to keep reading.

Think: Worry equals suspense.

The best part is, the secrets for ratcheting up the suspense are easy to implement. Here are six of the most effective.

Many writers try to skirt externalization, because they “say” they want to write “literary works.” Yet, even in literary fiction, externalization is critical. Why?

Because 99 times out of a 100, when someone tells me their writing is “literary” this is actually code for “pages and pages of self-indulgent mind-vomit.” Hey, I’ve been guilty, too. Don’t feel badly. If we aren’t making mistakes we aren’t doing anything interesting.

Thinking does not literature make. Many writers don’t like externalizing because, as humans, we have been conditioned to shy away from conflict at all costs. Great fiction writers must do the exact opposite and generate as much (outward and inward) conflict as possible. Even “literary” writers don’t get a pass.