Elle was finally home for the evening, after a fun plotting the post launch life with her business partner, father. A years long project was wrapping up as she’d spent the day doing the finishing touches on video edits that only she knew how to organize. The team had everything they need to make the rest happen. She splurged on a lemon drop martini for the evening, getting in creative mode for the tasks ahead for the year.
When she arrived home, her husband was still out at the community theater production of Mary Poppins and her daughter was out at a graduation party. She had one of her favorite gourmet cupcakes, from an earlier trip to the library closest to that bakery. Life was good, and predictable and all was well. Work was shaping up, plans were in place, discussions that evening were very inspired.
At 9:52pm, an usual time in her boring, predictable life, she had a call from an unknown number. Because of the time, her gut said to answer it. Spammers don’t tend to call that late?
That unknown caller would change her entire life in an instant (plus 6 hours of hell.) Everything she knew would become foreign. Her relationship to everything in house would be flipped and full of torment. The humdrum days she lived, with a little boredom but mostly gratitude, were over, forever.
How such a call, from an unknown number, could be that powerful, is something she knew happened in books, but never to someone like her. Life was pretty drama free with nobody in her life having addictions or playing dangerous sports. There was such a small family it wasn’t even as if she had 30 plus cousins and nieces and nephews where she assumes calls of urgency are more frequent, to update everyone on some terrible news or maybe even thrilling news, like a new engagement.
Nope. That lemon drop martini and gourmet cupcake would be the last joyful moments in her simple, but sweet, typical Midwest, American life.
Would she replay that day, wishing it were different? What about the day before? Could she have known? Is there something she could have done differently?
The sweet, grateful answer is no. There were no regrets. There are no regrets. Only four lives, deeply intertwined, would become three.
I love the building of the atmosphere and involving the reader in your character’s ordinary life. I keep up with the story until the unexpected call: a job familiar to me, video project vibes, busy family members, husband and daughter. The atmosphere of the ordinary world caught well, shared well. Slow-burn start, context, everything a reader needs to reveice orientation about the world they are pulled in.
Then I feel like the whole incident turns into a rush conclusion of the rest of the story, summarizing and evaluating everything else in advance and closing it with an ending / epilogue energy of no regrets, glancing back at what happened when it’s over.
Lesson 1 was an “inciting incident” craft assignment.
(I apologize for the terminology, I studied screenplay writing and we called this special event that invades the ordinary at the beginning of the story: inciting incident”.)
It’s OK to write the beginning only, until the call comes and leave it hanging with a cliffhanger, questions, discomfort, the insecurity of “What now?” That’s the purpose of an inciting incident. It’s important for you to know what will be the consequence of that, but the reader prefers to receive the puzzle pieces one by one, not all at once.
I would rather love to read: Who was the caller? A man? A woman? Does your character know them? Are they a stranger? What did they say?
E.g.: “Miss, please, hurry to the hospital, your husband was hit by a car and was brought in to E.R.” or whatever the call is about. And instead of jumping to conclusion, evaluation, I would focus on the next step only. You have plenty of time and pages to unfold the story, to show the impact on the character’s life.
The call can still remain “something she knew happened in books, but never to someone like her”. My recommendation is about shifting the focus from “what happened” (ending / epilogue energy) to “what may happen next” (beginning / incinting incident energy). The inciting incident is to push the story in motion and ignite curiosity: what happens next? How will this impact the character’s life?
I hope this helps. You have great material, you can keep what works and still shift the energy to a curiosity triggering beginning without conclusion and evaluation. At this point, the reader doesn’t need to know yet, how the call will impact the character’s life.