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What's the inciting incident to your story?

What's the inciting incident to your story?

An inciting incident is an event that sets the plot of a book... it is also the topic of this page.

I am answering random questions today about world building, over on Reddit and decided to take my answers from there and expand upon them even further over here. So that's what this page is. Me rambling on about various aspects of world building techniques I use when writing the Quaraun series. The questions I am answering are embedded here. Clicking the link in the embedded question will take you to the original Reddit page where you can see the original answer along with other people's answers. If you wish to comment, you can do so on the Reddit page where a place to do so is provided.

Any ways, I found this question asking about inciting incidents, and what specifically the inciting incident of everyone's current story was. It got me wondering if I even have an inciting incident in any of my stories. You know me... grab a character and toss him into a portal, let it spit him out somewhere a random generator gave me on the fly, and run with it. That's how I write most of my novels and short stories.

I am almost tempted to go back into every story I've ever written to see if I can find the inciting incident of each one and figure out what exactly it is I do to come up with each inciting incident I've used in the past.

Why?

Well, because I've never in my life gone out of my way to sit down and ask: "Now what inciting incident should I use?"

It seems silly.

Of course, I've also never sat down and asked: "What plot should I use?" or "Should I write this theme or that theme?" In fact 90% of the questions newbie writers ask on Reddit and forums, leave me perplexed, baffled and confused as to why these so-called writers are incapable of thinking for themselves... I mean, they are supposed to be authors, right? And what do we authors do? We think of things to write.

Have you ever seen me ask a question on a forum... EVER?

No.

Why?

Because, I'm a writer. I write. I don't run around second guessing myself or bumming story ideas off others. Which is why I can't understand questions like: "Should I write this story or that story?" Honey, if you don't have enough will power to decide for yourself what story to write, then you have no business being in this business.

But what does that have to do with inciting incidents you ask? Well, quite a lot. You see, as it turns out, most of the people who answered, answered to say, they needed help thinking of an inciting incident, instead of saying, "Hey, I'm writing this, and the inciting incident is..."

Many of them didn't know what an inciting incident was. 

An inciting incident is an event that sets the plot of a book. It's the thing that happens to cause your character to go: "OMG! I'm doing this..."

For example, the Quaraun series has lots of little inciting incidents in each novel, but the big inciting incident that pushes the entire series forward, is the death/suicide of Quaraun's lover. BoomFuzzy's death is the inciting incident that causes Quaraun to become a Necromancer, to try to resurrect his lover, and everything from that point on snowballs from there.

I'm working on two right now. (Both novels for a long run series that already has several novels published, so dealing with already established characters here. All 3 of them are none human wizards, 2 are drug addicts and the other is a drug dealer. All 3 are on the run as wizards in this setting are basically "the scum of the earth" in the minds of most people. And as you'll notice, they often meet up with cultists and demons, it's kind of an ongoing theme in the series, and happens in both of these 2 I'm working on now.)

In one: The City of The Slushies...

The series has 3 main characters, 1 primary (Quaraun) and his 2 companions (BoomFuzzy and GhoulSpawn). At the beginning if this story, two of them wake up in a frozen desert with no idea where they are or how they got there or where their other companion is. As portals are a thing in this series and portals are unstable and can appear anywhere and send you anywhere (different time, different place, different realm, even to a different galaxy), they assume they were sucked up by a portal and spit out here.

After a while they run across the only city in this vast desert and discover it's a group of Humans lead by a friendly squid-headed demon. They soon start to realize something is very wrong with the city as the people seem to exists without ever eating food and only drink slushies all the time.

The entire culture is built around a religion that worships slushies, with each sect/branch of the religion divided by what flavour slushie it worships. (People who worship cherry slushies, for example, wear red, live in red houses, grow red flowers, only have red furnishings, and completely shun every one who worships any other flavour. Lemon slushie worshipers have yellow, raspberry slushy worshipers have blue, etc.)

They really don't want to get involved in what appears to be a very radical cult, but they need to find their friend and find a way back home (and find out where they are and how they got there, so they can figure out how to get back home.)

The inciting incident in this story is very simply, the fact that the three wizards want to go home. They do not want to be in this city. They don't even know how they got in this city. But they are trapped here until they can figure out a way to get back home.

In the other: The Summoner of Darkness

The main character, once again, Quaraun, is pregnant but he (yes, he, as in a pregnant male) is hiding it from the 2 companions he's travelling with (again BoomFuzzy and this time also ZooLock).

Quaraun is hiding the pregnancy, partly because he's not sure he's not imagining it (he's a drug addict so he's used to having strange hallucinations, but as he's now coming to realize this is not a hallucination this time, he's trying to stay off drugs, to not hurt the baby, which is not easy for him.)

He's also trying to figure out how it happened, as in how in the hell did he get pregnant when it's not possible for males to be pregnant?

At the same time he doesn't realize that one of his traveling companions is not the person he thinks they are, that they are really a Demon and are in fact aware he's pregnant and are also a cult leader and planning a gathering of cultists to sacrifice his other companion, because it's a Lovecraftian based story and the cultists believe the baby is the Elder God about to be reborn. So basically, he has to fight cultists, defeat tentacle demons, and figure out how to deal with being pregnant when males shouldn't be able to be pregnant in the first place.

In this story the inciting incident is the pregnancy itself.

So basically the inciting incident of both stories is:

"What the hell? What? Why? How? And HOW?"

>In my world the image of what a person saw before their death is actually imprinted in their eyes so my MCs really, really need the body gone.

Have you looked into the history of the Jack the Ripper case? It was believed, in that era, that the last image you saw was on the victims eyes, and so the already mutilated victims were further mutilated by the detectives and doctors who did all sorts of experiments on the victims eyes and brains hoping to get a glimpse of what Jack the Ripper looked like.

I was researching Jack the Ripper for a college essay a years ago, and I had found a person who had all sorts of newspaper clippings from the era. The reporters were allowed in to autopsy rooms back then, so the newspaper reports were filled with all sorts of details about what the doctors did in their attempts to get the images of Jack the Ripper's face off the eyes of the women he'd murdered.

Before I had studied the Jack the Ripper murder cases, I had no idea that people actually believed the image on the eye ball thing. I had heard of it used in novels before, but I didn't realize it was an actual real belief.

It's something you might want to look into for research for your story.

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On Writing The Quaraun Series

The Complete Index To Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Moon Elf Society, But Was Afraid To Ask;

or

The Zaharam-Chapelle-Parunas  Ethnographical World Building Questionnaire

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World-Building In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Creating a 1400's Fantasy World For Time Traveling Wizards
2. How Your Degree Affects Your World Building
3. How would you explain your Fantasy world to a stranger?
4. In what order do you create your world?
5. Writing Maine: How To Write About Maine Life Accurately
6. The Cover Art Gallery 

Weird-Building In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Why is there a kitchen sink in my pocket?
2. Twerking Dragons - The Joys Of Writing with A Voice Recorder
3. The Saco River Curse
4. What The Ocean Gives Me (How Things In Your Life Affect Your Writing)

Building A Magic System In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Wizards vs Witches vs Sorcerers: How are they different?
2. Magic Systems and How to Build Them
   
3. Necromancy: How will resurrection affect society as a whole?
4. Spell-casting Side Effects of Magic
5. Necromancy FAQ - A Real Necromancer Compares Fantasy Necromancy With The Reality
6. Colour Magic - Gypsy Style
7. Beware of White Men In Gypsy Clothing: Fake Psychic Scams
8. Child Sacrifice in Fantasy Novels

Plotting & Writing Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Ernest Hemingway Style of Writing Literary Fiction Used In Epic Fantasy Novels
2. Do you write a novel start-to-finish?
3. Ideas, Ideas, Ideas (Where Do You Get Them?)
4. Should I plan for ending or just keep writing?
5. NaNoWriMo Overachievers: How did you do it?
6. How Long is 50,000 Words?
7. Why Write 50,000 Words In 30 Days?
8. How long does it take to hit 1667 words?
9. Average Typing Speed

Character Creation In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. What exactly makes an Elf an Elf? 
2. Phookas
3. Writing Medieval Servants: Their jobs
4. Writing Albinos With Medical Accuracy
5. FAQs About Quaraun
6. Transgender, Transsexual, Transvestite, or Intersex

Writing Sex In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. How To Write Hot Sex?
2. The Amazon Adult Dungeon
3. Why Quaraun Is Not Erotica (2015 Answer)
4. Why Quaraun Is Not Erotica (2017 Answer)
5. Suicide, Rape, & Abuse 

Disabled Characters In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. On being a handicapped CosPlayer at PortCon Maine 2017
2. Quaraun & Autism In Fantasy Novels
3. On Writing A Clinically Insane Character Accurately, While Avoiding The Psychopath Stereotype
4. Autistics Have Feelings Too & Diverse Books Rant

Drug Use In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Psychedelics In A 'High' High Fantasy World (High Elves Getting High)
2. High, High Elves: Elves on Opium | Drug Use 

Horror In Bizzaro Dark High Fantasy Yaoi

1. Why do Lovecraftian beings come to earth?
2. Writing Horror That Features Violence Against Children 
3. Writing Stuff That Churns Your Gut
4. Twighilight Not Twilight

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The Quaraun Series On Amazon:

I am wondering why has Amazon moved the Quaraun books to the category "Transgender Romance" and also "Gay Erotica"? The base story is a deeply depressed, suicidal, drug addict Elf who's lover commit suicide and he's trying not to do the same. It's an old Elf in a tavern, monologuing a lot of flashbacks and back story scenes of his youth. These stories are dark, bloody, angsty, full of drug use, murder, rape, Medieval torture, mental/physical/emotional abuse, and references to depression and suicide - no romance in it, unless you count the occasional (and usually brutally violent) rape scenes that show up in nearly every volume - sorry - no clue what Amazon is thinking or why they moved these to Romance and Erotica, but these books are NOT even close to being Romance or Erotica on any level at all. When I published these books I put them in "Dark Fantasy" and "Yaoi". If they show up in any category other then "Dark Fantasy" and "Yaoi", it's because Amazon put them there without my authorization or approval.

~EelKat

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Author Interviews
On Writing The Quaraun Series:

1. Question Everything Before Putting It In Your World 

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Author Interviews
On CosPlaying The Quaraun Characters:

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Author Interviews
Reacting To Old Orchard Beach's
White Power Gay Hating Over Reaction Ban
Of The Quaraun Series:

1. Question Everything Before Putting It In Your World 

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The 4 door white truck continues to sit at the end of my drive way (146 Portland Ave, Old Orchard Beach, Maine) near every night around sunset, reeving it's engine and squealing it's tires, with the driver yelling anti-gay threats and obscenities out the window. He continues to do the same thing at my dad's apartment building (Biddeford Maine) a few times a week, usually in mid to late afternoon time. He continues to follow me to shopping to various stores in various towns throughout the states.

Phrases he yells from the truck include:

"Kill or be killed remember Saco Shaws all transsexuals are alike"

"I keep a gun under the seat of my truck, I'm gonna use it to shoot you in the head, you transvestite freak"

if cars are going by he yells to them: "that thing is Ken's son, look at how's it's dressed; it's insane, it has autism, we can't allow that thing and it's gay cars in our family friend town of Old Orchard Beach"

He often babbles deranged ramblings about something he calls "the gay-pocalypse", raving lunacy about how "all the gays are gathering" on his doorstep. He raves some crazy nonsense about how Armageddon is coming and the war to end all wars will be "the gays against the Christians" and Christians have to be ready to "kill the gays"

My car is the Autism Awareness Car and had 2.5million marbles glued to it (I have Autism - savant - Kanner's syndrome) he claims tat my car "is gay" because of what it looks like. My car has been vandalized several dozen times, including to have the tires slashed 7 times in 6 months.

After dark often around 10PM, he stands at the end of the logging road across the street from me and shoots at my motohome (in February 2014 he shot holes in my neighbour's barn while doing this). I have video footage of 3 of his shootings at me here:  https://youtu.be/NUebzJ9sz9U and here: https://youtu.be/C4dZbgG-Smw

This has gone on since August 2013 now, in addition to all the vandalism, hate crimes, pet beheadings, etc that has happened, including the bomb that blew up our house in 2006.

As you know, that whole time I had not been able to get a plate number on the truck. He as just here again, and I just realized why I could not get a plate number... there are no plates on the truck, either on the front or on the back. However, as he was driving away today... I noticed, there is a plate, stuck up in the back window of the truck, where it can barely be seen, deliberately obscured from view behind a silver tool box.

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If You Like The Quaraun Series You Might Also Like:

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Writing Resources I Use When Writing The Quaraun Books:

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