After I turned in Sour Notes, Jazz Singer Book #2, I immediately started working on Even The Score, Book #3. On a roll, so best to take advantage of it. But by the weekend, I realized I was in trouble, and that the story was crap.
I mean, real utter crap.
And it was pretty clear why.
The story didn’t have a strong outline. Outline? Heck, it didn’t even have the faintest shimmer of one. A smoke trail had more substance.
Sour Notes had a strong outline. So did Face The Music. Each rough as hell, neither one matching the final result. But I knew where I was going, and how I was going to get there. Bob the Blob was a surprise, but one I ran with and glad that I did. Bob is awesome. Bob made the story better, and very likely saved it. She certainly saved Jazz’s soul.
Even The Score – well, I had bits of the middle. I had a kind of ending. I even had some of the start, a classic Walks Into A Bar scene. But what I didn’t have was the rest. Hell, I didn’t even have a good title. I had characters, but nothing tying them together that made a lick of sense.
So the story was a mess. Lots of really good bits, but overall – crap.
So that Saturday afternoon I sat down, sans laptop, sans phone, and went at it old school. Paper. Pencil. Scribbles, ideas, outlines, diagrams.
Nothing clicked. All sorts of good ideas for later books, but I just kept coming back to the same friction point – the Inciting Incident.
For a narrative, the Inciting Incident is important. Paramount. Everything else hinges on that. Without an Incident, you’re not going to be able engage the reader and keep them turning the page. You’re not even going to engage yourself. And buddy, if you can’t engage yourself, both as a writer and a reader, you’re just grinding away. Which is fine if you’re making sausages or law. Story telling – not so much.
Now, an Inciting Incident is not the Call To Action. For detective stories this is often the client coming through the door. Rather, an Inciting Incident is what causes the client to come through the door. The Incident doesn’t even need to happen on the page – it can, but often doesn’t. But it does need to occur – somewhere. A dingy room, full of used needles. A damp alley on a moonlit night. A protest next to a research facility. The other side of known space. Doesn’t matter. But it does have to occur. Best if you can make it tangible in some way, so the reader can relate – but failing that, it should at least mean something to the main character. Otherwise they are just grinding.
In Book #1, Face The Music, the Inciting Incident is the Dead Friend. In Book #2, Sour Notes, it’s the Explosion. In Book #3, it’s the… the… the… dammit, what?
I didn’t have it. I had ideas, but nothing firm. Everything I came up with, leveraged against Jazz and the new character, Abby, didn’t seem to jell. Nothing seemed to fit, each one sounding stupider than the previous six.
So I retreated to my Whrilypop and made popcorn on the grill. Two-thirds cup of kernels, tablespoon of canola oil, extra salt. No butter. Three minutes of cranking, shake and dump.
Half way through a bucket of crunchy white fluff and sodium I had it. The Inciting Incident, slotting in naturally with the rest of the scribbled notes. So natural, it felt like it had been there all along, hiding from me. The rest just followed: the Call, the Reveal, the Turn, and finally, the Close. All tied together into one, big glorious Jazz-fueled romp in and around Xeno City.
You know how HARD it is to transcribe paper with oil soaked bits of popcorn stuck it?
The outline for Book 3 goes on for fifteen pages of seemingly random shorthand. Initials for names, brackets and numbers for places. It jumps back and forth randomly. Rough, unpolished, but usable. A guidebook. An outline. More importantly, it was the tool I desperately needed so I could get the job done properly and in a timely manner, weeks ahead of schedule.
The end result doesn’t exactly match the outline, of course. I knew that it wouldn’t. The story diverged, taking me places I didn’t expect. Better, more interesting places. Whole scenes were written, pulled apart, remixed. The end result grabs you, makes you turn the page just to see what happens next.
But without an outline, a rough blueprint, I’d still be be grinding away.