I’m about halfway through the septet’s book two, which has the working title The Deer-Slayer, and I’m about to throw my characters off the edge.
There’s a dictum in fiction that you have to get your characters in trouble as quickly as possible. That’s the inciting incident—something that disturbs the life of your protagonist so that person takes a different track. This disruption falls at or toward the beginning and starts the mechanism of the narrative.
But there’s also that point where a trouble brewing all through the story finally boils. This isn’t the climax, but rather where the rising action (in terms of the five-act structure—exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement) kicks into gear.
