I'm starting to wonder about my inciting incident. Is it the thing I think it is?
I've seen many times that in a murder mystery, the Inciting Incident is when someone dies, or the body is discovered. So that's where I had it.
And then the First Plot Point is when the main character is irreversibly pulled into the adventure.
The thing is, my first murder doesn't really… affect anything? It happens "off screen" and the main characters hear about it via a news alert. It creates a bit of atmospheric tension (just the tiniest bit), and fewer people are going out and buying ice cream.
And then my First Plot Point was where the main character ends up getting involved. He gets in a direct confrontation with this serial killer. And then he discovers a body. Now things are starting to happen. I think. That's where I left off.
So, I don't know. My Inciting Incident doesn't seem to incite much. Which either means I have the wrong thing there, or I'm just not using it to its full potential. Could go either way.
My word count is way low, considering where I am in the plot, so I know there needs to be more stuff at the beginning. I just don't know what. There's certainly room for more inciting.
I figure I've made a crucial error here, so I've gone back to outlining to try to fill out the beginning without actually having to write the scenes out. I got a book on outlining and everything. There's a few different approaches.
I've heard that some people like to outline by hand. I can tell you right now, that doesn't work for me. I've tried. I thought I'd give it a whirl to see if it helped.
Nope.
I have four scenes at the beginning. And then some… other stuff happens, and then the Inciting Incident.
But trying to outline by hand, on paper, I list the first few scenes, and then I stop, because I don't know what happens next, and I can't jump to the Inciting Incident and work my way backwards, because it's on paper and I don't know how much space I'll need.
So then I got yWriter. It's a program that I used to have. It lets you create a book broken into scenes and chapters, and lets you add character bios and locations and stuff. I don't know if I'll end up writing the story in there, but I'm trying to outline with it. I still haven't figured out what else happens in the beginning of the book, and how I'm going to make it to 10,000 words before my Inciting Incident. Or what the Inciting Incident actually is.
I'm tempted to try the index card approach, where I would write all my scenes on notecards and then actually physically rearrange them. But I don't have a ton of index cards, and I don't know if writing out all my scenes again will help.
It's starting to get really discouraging that I can't manage to get this thing off the ground. And every time I started thinking too much about it, I end up cutting scenes that aren't working, rather than adding ones that do.
A bit of an update. I have found a work around for hand writing and not having enough index cards. I've printed out a blank outline with spaces for things, and I'm just writing scene ideas on strips of post-it notes and sticking them where I think they should go. We'll see how this goes.
I'll see you next time.
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