Screenwriting Tips, You Hack

Chapter | four

Inciting Incident: Away We Go

There's a reason movies (usually) don't open with the main character being born. One, birth is bloody and horrifying and they'd have to slap an R rating on every film, and two, movies aren't supposed to be about the protagonist's entire life. They're about the most important, transformative, and screenplay-worthy event that happens in that person's life.

The inciting incident isn't necessarily the start of your script, but it's definitely the start of your story. It's the event that pushes your protagonist inexorably toward their destiny. If we think of a screenplay as one long answer to a question about your protagonist (i.e., “How far would she go for love?” or “What does she believe in so much that ...