no story without an inciting incident
March 24, 2006
If you’re analyzing a film, or writing one of your own, and you’re having trouble identifying that first Driver event (which most people refer to as the Inciting Incident), there is something you should consider.
If it never happened, there would be no movie!
Whether it’s an action or some kind of decision on a character’s part, it’s that event that sets the main problem of the story and gets the ball rolling.Most wanna-be screenwriters (and some professional ones, too) know the major plot points in a story: Inciting Incident, First Act Turn, Mid-point, Second-Act Turn and Concluding Event. Dramatica recognizes the same thing but takes it one step further - all these events will be of the same type - either five actions or five decisions.
If an action opens up the story, then an action must end it. Same with decision stories. I’m sure there’s a good explanation why they all have to be the same, but suffice it to say, if you mix them up, you’ll lose your audience.
And because Dramatica splits a story up into four acts (because everything in Dramatica revolves around the quad), it’s easy to visualize where these plot points occur.
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