In a post on Writers in the Storm, Laura Baker offers advice for finding out what your story is really about. “At the heart of every story is a character who faces a struggle and makes a discovery,” she says. The struggle is your plot and the discovery is your character arc.
In other words, the struggle is how you might describe what your story is about. The discovery is the actual heart of what your story means. Baker describes how to use the inciting incident to set up both your struggle and your discovery. “The Inciting Incident is not a random event,” she says. “It must have meaning to the rest of the story. It can seem random—a car accident, a murder, catching a fiancé in bed with your best friend—but this event rocks the world of your protagonist.”
Importantly, the inciting incident is not the event, but the next choice your character makes. The choice is what actually shoves the story forward.
