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A vital occasion in nearly everyone’s life is ‘the inciting incident. All sorts of people from journalists to judges, teachers to students, and (my favorite of course) authors to audiences need to know what act or condition initiates the sequence of events that constitutes a story.

The inciting incident is the moment of change, but contrary to popular belief that moment is not always the first event or occasion of note whether in current events, news reports, or fictional stories. Here’s an example. A local evening newscast opens with an announcement, ‘Four dead in Ohio.’ Death usually grabs our attention. Multiple deaths usually gain more attention faster. But regardless of who you are, policeman, priest, lawyer, homemaker, performer, or someone else, that bald announcement, ‘Four dead in Ohio,’ gives no information about the incident that resulted in those deaths.

Information about that particular inciting incident can be found all over the web; the Wikipedia link is here. This country has more recent but no less tragic incidents of senseless killings. Each of those incidents has its own specific inciting factor(s). One of the difficulties we struggle with is seeing the commonalities in these kinds of incidents. Was it the weapon, the human hand on the weapon, the emotional or political circumstances at the time? There as many answers to those questions as there are people to provide answers.

What authors know, and observant readers too, is that even the same type of inciting incident can prompt an infinite number of results depending on the circumstances at the time. For example, if every story began (that’s the inciting part) with a kiss, each story would diverge from that point depending on who was kissing whom, why they were kissing, when, where, how, and a host of other circumstances that combine to create that specific kiss.

Why is all of this important? Knowing the beginning, or the cause, is as universal a human need as breathing. While the inciting incident may not be the fundamental cause of an event or circumstance, the inciting incident is nearly always where our search starts for the meaning of results like ‘four dead in Ohio.’ We search out this meaning in pursuit of better understanding about human nature and the forces that prompt our actions. And what is more vital to our survival than understanding how our natures contribute to the circumstances of our world?

In a romance novel we cannot believe in the happily ever after without following the trail of events leading to and from the inciting incident of a story. In life we cannot believe in the rightness or wrongness of a result without knowing the circumstances surrounding the inciting incident.