Inciting Incidents

I'm currently reading Donald Miller's A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, and something he wrote made me think a little more about this "emerging adulthood" phenomenon, which I wrote about in a previous post.

The book covers what Miller learned while writing a screenplay for his memoir, Blue Like Jazz. Along with valuable spiritual and developmental lessons, Miller learns, along with us the reader, some useful story devices. One device he describes is called the "inciting incident." An inciting incident is that moment in a story where a character is forced into action, forced to confront his fears, take a stand or simply get off his butt. In Spider-man 2, Peter Parker would not admit his love for Mary Jane, and his powers were getting weaker. That is until, during a heart-to-heart with his red-headed true love, the evil villain Dr. Octopus throws a sedan through the coffee-shop window and kidnaps her. That event causes him to leave behind his old self and confront both the villain he fears he cannot conquer and the girl he fears he cannot win. Cheesy example, but it's the first that came to mind.

The point is, story characters, like real people, rarely change until they are forced to. Miller writes:

"A general rule in creating stories is that characters don't want to change. They must be forced to change.... The rule exists in story because it's a true thing about people. Humans are designed to seek comfort and order, and so if they have comfort and order, they tend to plant themselves, even if their comfort isn't all that comfortable. And even if they secretly want something better."

He goes on to describe, darkly, a report he heard that women who suffer from domestic violence often remain in abuse relationships, even after seeking help, because they are so afraid of change.

It makes me wonder if one of the reasons my generation is so reluctant to grow up is a lack of inciting incidents. Our grandparents and parents lived through depression, world war, social revolution and an economy that was not yet so service based. I suspect that so many of our forefathers, as with so many in the developing world, found spouses, work, children and community without so much naval gazing, because their very lives and subsistence depended on it. They had no chance to find themselves in travel or graduate school.

Several years ago, at what was in hind-site exactly the right moment, God dropped the woman who became my wife back smack dab into the middle of my life. In doing so, He ignored the ocean between us, our different cultural backgrounds, and the fact that neither of us could find our way out of the brokenness, pain, sin and captivity we had found ourselves in. We did not expect it or ask for it, but suddenly she was in my neighborhood, within walking distance, asking me to see her. Reconciliation showed up, unannounced. That was an inciting incident. I would need a few more before, a few years later in the National Arboretum, I asked her to marry me.

I am not proud that I needed inciting incidents to grow, and that I would not have escaped without divine intervention. I may still need a few. That is why, however misguided and lost my generation of "boys who can shave" (as Mark Driscoll calls them) may be, I cannot look down my nose at them. I am one of them, desperate for grace and in need of truth. Like every generation we need the wisdom, peace and hope that comes with the Gospel of Christ. Within the church community, we may need to be "inciters" to one another as well. Let's face it, we all need more help than we let on, even the real adults. Wherever we stand, this is my prayer and, thankfully, has been my experience: God will be as merciful and severe as he needs to be to open our ears, our minds and our hearts, so that we may grow and mature in Him.