@RapeU I'll respond one more time. I'm trying to help with this feedback. I don't want to try to tell you what story you are supposed to write. So if I mention an example of what an inciting incident or a dramatic question could be, I mean that as an example as I try to explain the structural issue, and not as a recommendation of what you should do specifically
Interestingly, in your response you point to two potential inciting incidents but you don't mention what the dramatic question of your story is. I think the simple reason for that is: The story doesn't have one. And that is also why the examples you point to as exciting incidents don't work.
Let me address the main point you raised:
RapeU wrote: Sun Mar 22, 2026 7:45 pm
I genuinely don't understand how you missed it. Wendy's parents and Amanda Barkley are both inciting incidents with the question of "what are they going to do?"
I didn't miss these moments. I talked about one already in my last post. But let's take the Amanda example seriously. Could Hannah letting Wendy know in chapter 2 that Amanda proclaims to have unfinished business with her be an inciting incident? In theory, yes. In your story it isn't. Let's look at that in detail.
Amanda is not mentioned at all in chapter 1. Then she is briefly introduced in chapter 2 which could be the inciting incident. She is mentioned a total of 6 times in chapter 2, mostly as an aside to the threat of Wendy's parents showing up. Amanda isn't mentioned nor affects anything that happens in chapters 3, 4 and 5. She then shows up in chapter 6 again for the wedding ceremony, briefly interrupts the ceremony, but is escorted out within two short paragraphs of first appearing on the scene. She is escorted away by two ushers that Aisha summons. She makes another brief appearance in chapter 7. Throughout chapters 2 to 7, your protagonist Wendy does nothing to deal with the threat of Amanda.
Amanda's appearance is clearly not the inciting incident. How can you identify the inciting incident? Ask yourself the question: What happens if I remove that event from the story? How is the trajectory of the story changed by that event? If your answer is "not at all" or "very little", then it is not your inciting incident. Let's go through the examples I mentioned in my last post again.
1) Star Wars: If Luke and Obi-Wan don't get the message from Leia and the Empire doesn't kill Luke's aunt and uncle, then Luke never goes on his journey and the story doesn't happen.
2) Lord of the Rings: If Gandalf doesn't reveal to Frodo that his ring is not just some random magic ring but the ring of Sauron, he stays home until the Nazgul find and kill him. The story doesn't happen.
3) American Pie: If the boys don't make their pact, none of the ensuing shenanigans happen. To put it bluntly: Jim never puts his dick into the apple pie.
4) Love Actually: If Juliet never sees the wedding video Mark filmed, then he never ends up with cue cards in front of her house confessing his love. You can go through the other plotlines in that story in a similar fashion.
5) Titanic: If Jack never stops Rose from jumping off the ship, they never have their brief romance before the ship sinks. Presumably, Rose kills herself and Jack may or may not survive the sinking of the ship.
You see the difference? Now do the same for your story. What happens if you remove Amanda from the story? Chapter 2 loses a few lines of dialogue. Hannah and Wendy's fight happens the same in chapter 3. Zoe and Wendy still have a fun day at the spa in chapter 4. Wendy still does the same things in chapter 5, getting dressed, etc. We lose a brief two paragraphs long interruption of the wedding ceremony in chapter 6. Amanda reappears briefly in chapter 7 and whatever she was trying to do is prevented by Aisha without her affecting anything so the reception loses a few lines of superfluous narration.
Amanda is not your inciting incident. She is a minor plot point and obstacle that your protagonist never engages with. And the same is essentially true for Wendy's parents. They are mentioned a bit more often, but if you remove their message in chapter 2 from the equation, nothing really changes.
So the question you should ask yourself is this: You set up in chapter 1 a situation of Wendy and Hannah loving each other and they are about to get married. What event occurs shortly after that fundamentally(!) alters the trajectory of events like Leia's message and the death of his aunt and uncle does for Luke? Or like the pact the boys make in American Pie? I would argue, there is no such event in your story. And therefore, you have no inciting incident.
I suspect you want to tell me now that Amanda's obsession is a seed for another story later on. I see the potential here. But you can not outsource the real conflict and narrative tension to sequels and spinoffs and hope that your readers stay engaged with what's going on now because of the vague promise that these seeds may have a payoff later on in another story.
Let me propose an example of how Amanda could be an inciting incident and how could plant a seed for a future story effectively. This is just for illustrative purposes, not to say you should write this exact story.
---
To me, Amanda feels dangerous, not just like a crazy ex. If you crash a wedding of an ex partner years after you split up, then you are not just hurt but obsessive in an unhealthy way. I would get it if she was Hannah's affair and she knew nothing of Wendy's existence until a week ago before the wedding. But yeah, if you crash your prom date's wedding years after you split up, you have a problem.
So, let's make Amanda the inciting incident, meaning her appearance has to fundamentally alter the ensuing events. She contacts Hannah similar to what we saw in chapter 2, but now we put Amanda at the forefront of the discussion in chapter 2, not Wendy's parents.
Chapter 3 is date night between Hannah and Wendy. They go out, you give us all the cute, witty banter and the emotional support between them as you usually do. But you interrupt their dinner at a fancy restaurant with Wendy spotting Amanda sitting at another table. Hannah confronts her, this turns into an argument, our leading ladies and Amanda are all thrown out of the restaurant. Date night is ruined.
Chapter 4 is the next day. After the encounter at the restaurant, Wendy and Hannah realize that Amanda is seriously unhinged and go to the police together or to a lawyer, or both. They think this is stalking, they want a restraining order. But since they only encountered Amanda in public at a restaurant, there is nothing the police or lawyers can do for them. But your protagonist(s) tried to deal with the problem in an active manner and failed.
Chapter 5 gives us a big fight between Wendy and Hanah not about some random event like the caterer cancelling. No, they argue about how to deal with Amanda. Wendy wants to confront her head on one more time. Hannah thinks they shouldn't give a stalker attention. The fight gets ugly. Wendy's insecurity comes through in that fight with her thinking Hannah only wants to avoid a confrontation with Amanda because she has some residual feelings for her. Wendy ends up sleeping on the couch that night.
Chapter 6 shows us Wendy and Hannah having to find a new caterer or having to talk to the photographer, whatever. You give them some scheduled event they both have to attend for the wedding planning. That event would still have occurred even without Amanda, but because of the preceding fight it now plays out very differntly. The atmosphere is tense. We get sarcastic Wendy and passive agressive Hannah instead of their usual cute routine. The tension escalates to the point that Wendy decides to spend the night at Zoe's instead.
And so on and so forth. Ultimately, Hannah and Wendy work together again, they deal with Amanda at the wedding, and get a restraining order.
I'm not saying you should write that exact story. And this is not some polished, thought through plot but a brainstormed amalgamation of ideas. But do you see how none of the events I'm describing there happen without the inciting incident, without Amanda inserting herself into their lives? If Amanda doesn't show up, we don't get the ruined date, they don't go the police/lawyer, they don't fight about how to deal with Amanda, we don't get the tense wedding planning, we don't get Wendy spending the night at Zoe's place.
That is an inciting incident or what an inciting is supposed to do. Everything that follows is shaped by that moment and how your protagonist(s) choose to react to it.
It also does something else: In that scenario, you would now have organically planted a seed for another story. In that plot, they end up preventing Amanda from disrupting the wedding and they might think that with the restraining order the problem is dealt with once and for all. But this does of course not address Amanda's obsession with Hannah. So naturally, you could now write a follow up story about Amanda abducting Hannah, Wendy or both of them for example.
You see the difference here to the way you planted your seeds for future stories? You don't suddenly have a random guy being present at the reception who plays no essential role in the story. The seed for the future story is naturally born out of the central narrative conflict of your current story. It's not planted in parallel to what's actually going on but arises out of the main events of the current story. It's not a distraction from the main plot line that your story has to briefly deal with.
---
I'll leave it at that. I don't think I can make this any clearer and I don't want for this to turn into an argument. I want to stress again that you don't need to follow that traditional storytelling model. You essentially wrote low stakes, low friction slice of life. And if that is what you wanted to do, then your story works as intended. But I, as a reader of the previous story The Blowout, find the choice to follow up a high stakes noncon story with a cutesy slice of life romance that is barely affected by the dramatic and traumatic events of the earlier story odd.
