I am currently doing outlining work on my novel and I am questioning when I should have the inciting incident of my story. So far I have a duel character POV, one who is a female slave in a southern city and one who is a demon spawn in a northern town. Both will have an inciting incident five chapters after they have been introduced, so chapter nine and chapter ten. These incidents are a slave riot in the southern city and a dragon attacking the northern town. These incidents will push the characters away from their status quo, the slave girl being confronted with how badly the slave population wants to rebel and the northern demon spawn being banished from the town due to his role played in the dragon attack. What I am wondering is if it takes me too long to get to these moments? Is chapter nine and ten just too far into the story for me to introduce these things? The first act will only continue for a few more chapters after this point, mostly to get the characters accustomed to their new environment and roles. I am planning on a time skip for the second act, meaning that the characters will go from children to teenagers. What I am fretting about is that it will feel jarring to go from the characters just adjusting to their new environment to suddenly time skip a few years. I guess this is a post wondering about structure as well. I am basically asking for advice on when to introduce certain things in the first act. I want my characters, plot, and world to be introduced before I move on to the second act. But I don't want to rush it either. I have never written a story like this before where I must accommodate for the fact that I only have half the book for each character POV. I feel like I don't have enough space to fit in all the things the first act will need, while I simultaneously still want to keep the duel POV perspective. Maybe I should just sit down and write? Any advice in the comments would be much appreciated, thank you.
My gut feeling? Yes. You want the reader to get to know your characters and sympathise with them. Character reveals itself best in action. So start nearest the inciting incident as you can manage, and let the reader judge your characters by how they handle the fallout. My own story's inciting incident happens two weeks before the first word on the page. It's not necessary for me to detail the incident itself, only how my characters deal with the consequences, the choices they make - which kick off my story as a whole. And that's another thing: Each chapter needs to be necessary before the call to action. This is doubly true for the early chapters of a long story. If your five chapters each fulfill these criterias, then write them anyway, and I doubt a single reader will complain. The hardest thing for a writer is to judge what is necessary and what superfluous. Can you reveal setting after the inciting incident through the actions of your characters? Chapters can have multiple purposes, you know When I read that you planned to skip forward in time for Act II, the first thing that shot through my mind was why you then didn't start the story at Act II, with your characters as teenagers. The feeling I got was 'Oh, the whole of first act will be introduction'. Needless to say, a first act shouldn't be an introduction. Half a chapter maybe, but not a whole act. My own take. Just five cents of it. Take of it what you will. Good luck!
How long are these chapters? I've not read your piece, but let's say they're short, maybe 3k a piece, that's about 30k-ish into your story for the respective inciting incidents. That's not unheard-of, and there are certainly going to be examples of books where the inciting incident doesn't happen closer to the beginning of the story, but 30k-ish into your novel would be an example of a novel that leaves the inciting incident rather late in the narrative. It's possible for the narrative to support this, but it would have to actually support it, else it's a lot of initial narrative that doesn't seem to be leading to the gas pedal, so to speak. Readers like me myself are not wont to entertain that much setup.
As early as possible, since the inciting incident is literally the event that, you know, causes the story to happen. Put another way, it's the point where your book actually starts getting interesting. As a general rule of thumb, you want to start by introducing your main character and establish the premise - basically all the information you think your readers are going to need to understand what's going on - and then you throw in the inciting incident. (Some approaches even allow you to have the inciting incident be the first thing to happen, even before establishing premise.) Nine to ten chapters certainly sounds way too long to spend on exposition. It's also possible you're using chapters wrong, since they are supposed to move the plot forward.
You say "act". Are you writing a screenplay or a novel? A novel doesn't necessarily follow a three act structure. In terms of the inciting incident - my advice would be to introduce it at an appropriate point. That can be anywhere. It can even happen before the story starts. You need to be the judge of that. Can you keep the reader hooked in for eight chapters? What are they doing in this time that the reader will find interesting? Readers get bored of backstory really quickly. Is what you are putting in those stories completely necessary, or can it be introduced at a later date?
In the ASoIaF books, the inciting incident is the death of Jon Arryn. That is the first move in the eponymous Game of Thrones, and it happens before the first words of the first book. We enter into the story with the inciting incident already technically behind us.
In my own novel, the 'inciting incident' happens at the end of my long Prologue (which portrays my main character and his brother, as children.) However, the conflict/dilemma which foreshadows the inciting incident, is portrayed in the very first scene. It took me a lot of manoevreing and rewriting to arrive at this structure. I was tempted at first to start with the inciting incident. That meant I had to use flashbacks to develop the characters enough so that the incident made sense. It didn't work very well. Eventually, I just decided to depict the two boys' close, but deteriorating relationship in chronological order—starting at the beginning where they were still close, and moving up to the inciting incident, at the end of the chapter, where my main character finally rejects his brother and drives him away. I think it works.
As I've read a few tips I've been given I have come to the decision that I will age up the characters to be around 12/13 at the story's start. This will allow me to overcome the time skip I would have needed at the beginning of the second act (yes I adhere to the three-act structure as I am writing the novel) and it would allow me to explore the characters thoroughly before any time skips happen. It would allow the story to flow more seamlessly and when those weeks, months, or years are skipped it won't feel as jarring. The reason why I felt like I needed a few chapters to build up to the inciting incident is because of mainly how I want the Male oc to be thrust down his path towards betterment. At the beginning of the story, he fails to complete a ritual where he is meant to bring pack prey for the elders to see. This coming of age ritual is set during the early spring, so it is supposed to be fairly easy. But as the protagonist discovers a dragon's nest inside a cave, which he doesn't know is a dragon's nest, he lets his prey slip away as he looks at it in awe and wonder. He spots a dragon egg on this burnt patch of rock and tries to get to it, but burns his foot when he tries to walk on the ground around it. He is then called back by the town's bells, where the elders judge him harshly for failing the ritual. Some blame it on his demonic features (he is a demon spawn, which is relevant to his story but not enough to make a big deal out of it right now) while others just say he wasn't man enough to kill something. His father will be disappointed in his failure and his older brother will mock him for it. The protagonist hopes to prove himself by bringing back the egg he saw in the forest since whatever creature laid it much have been a dangerous prey. He sneaks out during the night and manages to steal the egg and brings it back to town. The next morning he shows it to his father who freaks out and his brother just calls him 'the fucking stupidest cunt this side of the Hanis river'. The mc's father gears up to bring it back to the dragon nest but it is too late since the dragon has followed the scent of the egg to the town. Chaos ensues. People die, buildings are on fire, and things just don't look good. The mc's dad manages to fend off the dragon for a little while using magic and a special sword, but eventually, he does protect the mc and rest of the family. All hope seems lost until the drake is shot out of the sky by a ballista. The aftermath is the mc struggling to cope with the guilt over having caused all those deaths and fleeing the remnants of the town so the townsfolk won't kill him once they find out who brought the dragon egg to the town. He goes to the only place where he thinks he might find sanctuary, a fort belonging to a strange elven man. It is there he finds out it was the elf that shot the dragon, having used some of the forts old defenses. He begs for the man to let him stay, pleading that he will be killed if he goes back to his home. The elf reluctantly agrees and tells the mc that he will be allowed to stay if he does shores and hunt. Later when the mc displays some very basic knowledge of magic the elf decides to train him in 'the old ways' so he won't hurt those around him by mistake. The motivation(s) for the mc will be to become human, since he blames his demonic heritage for all the bad things that happened, much like how others have always told him. He also wants to redeem himself in the eyes of his people and family, to make up for what he did. The thing he will be forced to realize by the story's end is that even if he became human it wouldn't change what he did, nor that his demonic heritage is inherently a bad thing. He will also return to his home to face his past sins, no longer hiding from his past or blaming it on something else.
This would be your inciting incident, then. I can see how you might want to take a bit of time getting the point across that the dude is disliked because of his heritage and feels he has a lot to prove, but I have a hard time imagining how you figured you needed up to nine chapters to do so. If I may ask, how do you normally structure your chapters?
I use the program Ywriter to write down what I want in each chapter, however, since I have never tried to do an outlining and true structure of a story before this one I am a bit lost in what should be in each chapter. I know surface elements that I want and need, like how I want to introduce certain plot points or characters. For example, both mentor characters for each protagonist should be established in the first act. A problem I am facing is that when it comes to one of the antagonists is that I am uncertain when to first introduce the true antagonist for the male mc. The true villain so to speak will not be revealed until the end of the book, once the main character understands that he has been used for nefarious purposes. I do have minor villains planned, like a group of bandits, a cruel tax collector, etc. I suppose I can portray one of these actors as the main threat that stands in the way for the protagonist to achieve his goals to then pull out the rug from under him with the reveal that the person he should have been fighting was one of his trusted allies.
But for the reader it's still 9-10 chapters, and even if their stories were written as intertwined rather than separate arcs that presumably cleave together at some point, the initial division is the only real technicality because we would still be traversing this narrative territory, yes? Remember that once you hand the work to the reader, you, the writer, are effectively dead. You no longer get to explain anything to the reader. You don't get to point out technicalities. You can only sit mutely as the reader reads and hope that your words convey what they were meant to convey. If the reader protests that there are 9 - 10 chapters of expository setup that don't feel like they are leading somewhere, the reader is correct because there is no one there to say otherwise. And I'm not saying that's what's in play. For all I know these initial chapters may be riveting, but if the inciting incident is taking place this far along into the story, the question does arise.
I actually meant, you know, how do you decide when one chapter should end and another start, what purpose do they serve in structuring the plot, stuff like that. Right, but that actually makes it more important to get the inciting incidents in as early as possible, since you will need two of them and both have to occur before the reader gets bored.
I suppose I have to really think deeply about that. While I know what I want in the story and I am forming a structure in my head I am not certain when a chapter should start or end.
The inciting incident doesn't have to happen at the same time as the call to adventure. They should be relatively close, though. 9-10 chapters does sound like a lot of distance. If the events surrounding the failed ritual are significant enough, then that could be the inciting incident. The destruction of his town and subsequent visit to the elf personally sounds more like a call to adventure. Hm. Makes me think of The Black Rose by Thomas Costain. The inciting incident is a riot. After that, the rest of the act is important plot stuff like making stakes clear and establishing a few characters. The call to adventure (being willed into the service of Kind Edward) happens pretty close to the end of the first act, when those plot items culminate in solid motivation for him to answer said call and leave England for a number of reasons. That said, don't be boring. If the first act is mostly chaff you're definitely going to lose readers. If you're not sure, that's where beta readers will come in.
I also agree with lifeline to start the inciting incident as soon as you can. It seems normal to save the best for last sort of thing, and wait till after the set up, but I say, whatever set up, you can do after the inciting incident, do it, and use the inciting as a hook if you can.
