The Inciting Incident

What is the inciting incident that sparks your memoir? The question might apply also to fiction writers. It is any turning point in a life that changes something towards the remarkable. For memoirists, says US teacher Kaylie Jones, it’s the moment ‘the rock came through the window’; the day one’s life went ‘careening out of control’.

The inciting incident is a great starting point. Once we’ve identified our salient moment, the stage is set for the unfolding of the narrative.

I might joke that I have an inciting incident every day (J). But for the purposes of memoir, it’s the event that pertains to the particular story we are writing.

Pat Conroy, author of The Death of Santini, begins with the day his violent, fighter-pilot father moved the whole family interstate on the eve of Pat’s graduation at his much beloved school. Memoirist Cheryl Strayed pulled up stumps on her waitressing job after the death of her mother and the disintegration of her marriage, deciding, out of the blue, to trek The Pacific Crest Trail alone. Her memoir Wild – according to the book’s blurb – is a ‘A Journey from Lost to Found.’

The ‘brick’ for me that ‘came through the window’ was a less visible moment when I visited my dying father in a veteran’s hospital and I was confronted by the sudden glare of what looked like a failed relationship. When I met Kaylie Jones I realised that this was the nub of my story, not the experiences of others, reinforcing though they were.

An inciting incident might be a little harder to spot in a work of fiction. Yet there must be an observation or event buried away there that lies at the heart of the author’s idea. Thus, fiction and non-fiction writers will edge, each in their own way, the narrative forward – as do our poets. The challenge then is to render it.