In my previous blog we talked about the difference why you like you favourite characters. For this blog I thought I’d write about the character arc and focus on a story’s most important plot points.
In a TED talk, director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo (2001) Wall-E (2008), says that a story’s only job is to “make me care.” And stories make us care in a variety of ways. You may be taken by the visuals, or intrigued by character, you may identify with the themes or find value in the story’s eventual meaning. But the best hook comes in the beginning of the story when something happens to upset the balance of the protagonist’s state of being. That event is called the Inciting Incident.
The inciting incident is the first major plot point and is the cause for all the points to follow. All that preceded the inciting incident is a neutral state and all that follows is a state of change. An effective inciting incident is an event so radical that is unfathomable for the character to continue on his path without changing it.
In Finding Nemo the inciting incident is when Nemo is taken off the reef and separated from his father. In The Social Network, it is when Erica (Rooney Mara) breaks up with Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and in Inception it is when Saito (Ken Watanabe) offers Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) a job in exchange for amnesty and the chance to see his children again. Before each of these points, the character has existed in a (relative) state of peace. The inciting incident upsets this peace and presents a problem that the protagonist must solve. A story without the initial problem, is a story that remains still. And watching a character exist without any problems wouldn’t make for an interesting story.
Secondly, the Inciting Incident would be meaningless if the main character does not choose to act on it. Finding Nemo wouldn’t be the movie that is was if the father didn’t pursue the divers, in The Social Network, Mark’s decision to embarrass Erica and develop a website to take his mind off her wouldn’t have led to him developing Facebook. And Saito’s job offer spurred Cobb to assemble his team to be able to successfully achieve Inception. Each inciting incident creates an object of desire; a goal that the protagonists spends the narrative trying to achieve. In their desperation to achieve their goal, we learn about their true character in their decisions.
So that is the Inciting Incident. Next we will learn about the protagonist and the forces of antagonism.
