How to Write a Book - Tip #4, The Inciting Incident

By Latham Shinder

The nonfiction bestseller Blink by Malcolm Gladwell opens with curators at the J. Paul Getty Museum being scammed for $10 million while purchasing a sixteenth century BC sculpture, known as a kouros. The Tin Roof Blowdown, a novel by James Lee Burke, opens with a priest standing on a roof of a shack in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, trying to save the people trapped in the attic, as the full force of Hurricane Katrina bares down on him. Both books begin with a dramatic opening, or what screenwriters call the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is the first major incident in the telling. It's the cause of all that follows, and if you want your readers to keep reading, it's critical that you begin with a single extraordinary event. Typically an event that happens to your protagonist or is caused by the protagonist. I'm not talking about contrived action scenes or overexagerated promises. I am talking about beginning your book with a story, anecdote, or event that upsets the balance of forces within your story.

In the Blink of an Eye

Malcolm Gladwell's subtitle to Blink is The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. By opening with a $10 million art scam, rather than explaining exactly what he means by thinking without thinking, we follow the story of Federico Zeri, an art historian and a member of Getty's board of trustees. Zeri finds himself staring at the statue's fingernails. Though a dozen experts had signed off on the kouros-geologists had taken core samples of the statue and analyzed the marble under an electron microscope, electron microbe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, etc.-according to Zeri, something didn't look right.

Then we meet Evelyn Harrison, an expert on Greek sculpture, who knew the statue was a fake the moment she saw it. In a way, Blink is about why our hunches usually turn out to be true. Malcolm Gladwell might be the master of show don't tell. He doesn't begin his book by telling us how bright he is. He doesn't wow us with facts. He doesn't try to convince us he's right. What he does is tell us a story. A story about high-powered people being duped-experts with PhDs, and museum curators blinded by fame, and harebrained lawyers. In other words, he tells us a story we can't put down.

Excite Me, and Do It Fast

We've come to expect an exciting opening from mystery and suspense novels like James Lee Burke's Tin Roof Blowdown. Burke starts by putting us smack in the middle of Hurricane Katrina. A storm, as Burke describes it, "...with greater impact than the bomb blast that struck Hiroshima and peeled the face off southern Louisiana." It's only after we've been sucked into the book that he concentrates more intensely on his characters' inner lives than on the havoc around them.

Whether you write nonfiction or fiction, it's important that you create an inciting incident that throws your characters out of balance in a way that arouses in your readers, and your characters, the desire to restore that balance. Do that, and you've got your readers just where you want them. Reading.

Latham Shinder is author of The Graffiti Sculptor and founder of Shinder Consulting, a network of professionals who provide writing, editing, and proposal management services for organizations and individuals. Visit Latham at www.thegraffitisculptor.com

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