while plotting yesterday, i took a definitely-not-procrastinatory detour into writing craft videos on youtube and stumbled upon this overview of 4-act story structure by Adam Skelter.
i love his rebranding of the ‘inciting incident,’ which is an amorphous and contested term for the plot beat that sets the story in motion. basically, without the inciting incident, a story won’t happen.
Skelter says, “the term’s always bothered me because, technically, every single sequence has an inciting incident, has an incident that’s inciting the next behavior.”
Blake Snyder, who wrote the Save the Cat! book series which codified his popular 15-beat screenplay structure, calls this moment the ‘catalyst.’ but Skelter (pedantically, he admits) defines a catalyst as when there’s “a chemical reaction that’s already going to happen and a catalyst speeds it up… the catalyst is going to take something inevitable and enhance it.”
that’s why he calls this beat the ‘impetus’ instead.
“Impetus is a force that moves, that motivates movement,” he says, “which is a very specific thing that happens once in a screenplay.”
i’m not sure how the science or linguistics checks out on all of this, but the logic makes sense to me.
and i agree with his larger point: “I think whatever metaphor helps people make sense of the story and take care of the essential elements, that’s fine.”
watch more of Adam’s videos here on his youtube channel The Art of Story.