#and i didn't tell my brother (who is familiar with klk) that it was klk fic

[marshmallowgoop]

So, I participated in NaNoWriMo last month.

Nothing new. I’ve done this write-50,000-words-of-a-book-in-a-month thing since 2006.

But this year, after coming to the realization that I am absolutely garbage at plotting stories, I put more effort into plotting this year’s book than I ever have. 

I mean, this is my living room right now.

And to help me out with my plotting, I revisited Robert McKee’s Story (which I had first visited in a screenwriting class a couple of years back). And I’ve been thinking a lot about McKee’s chapter on the inciting incident.

As McKee defines it, the inciting incident “radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonist’s life” (190), and this event, “for better or worse,” then “[arouses] in him the conscious and/or unconscious desire for that which he feels will restore balance, launching him on a Quest for his Object of Desire against forces of antagonism (inner, personal, extra-personal). He may or may not achieve it. This is story in a nutshell” (196 - 197).

According to McKee, the inciting incident must happen onscreen, within the first 25% of the story, and it must compel the audience to ask the “Major Dramatic Question,” or, basically, What is this story ultimately leading up to? What is the protagonist going to face up against in the climax?

...yeah, my storytelling abilities are so limited that I’ve been thinking a lot about the most basic aspect of storytelling that there even is.

And when I say thinking a lot, I mean a lot! Since the “novel” I wrote last month is technically supposed to be a Kill la Kill Alternate Universe fanfiction, I spent a great deal of time considering what Kill la Kill’s inciting incident is... and this is a question that was so much harder to answer than it really should have been for someone who A, has a degree in creative writing, and B, has written over 180,000 words of Kill la Kill meta.

And, honestly, I’m not sure I could even tell you now what the inciting incident is.

My first thought was that the inciting incident is the murder of Ryuko’s father. The death of Isshin Matoi greatly upsets Ryuko’s life and brings her to Honnouji Academy to find answers.

Easy, right? I mean, summaries of Kill la Kill will basically all start with, “Searching for her father’s killer...”

But this event is basically shown in flashback, even in the manga adaptation, which begins with the moment of Isshin’s death and then cuts to the present-day Honnouji Academy. And Ryuko’s life isn’t exactly drastically changed until she enters Honnouji Academy, anyway; it’s going there that really gets the story going.

So would the inciting incident instead be Ryuko’s introduction in the first episode, where she stands before the school and the audience knows, “Well, she’s going to fight this system”? After all, if we work backwards, the climax of Kill la Kill is Ryuko and Senketsu’s fight against Ragyo, the woman who had built the system that the audience knows from the first few minutes of the first episode that Ryuko is going to fight. Since Ryuko discovers who killed her father halfway through the series, it’s clear that this knowledge isn’t what restores balance to Ryuko’s life or to the story---what ultimately restores balance is the destruction of Ragyo’s system and ideology.

But then there’s that question of what Ryuko wants. An inciting incident is all about want and desire, because it’s the inciting incident that pushes the protagonist to do something to get what they want (which in turn pushes the story forward). Ryuko might say she just wants answers to her father’s death, and it might seem that the inciting incident is the moment of his death, but what Ryuko’s really searching for is love and friendship; in fact, it’s even flat-out stated in the series that Ryuko’s reasoning for her revenge quest is to know her father better.

But if Ryuko’s unconscious desire for love and friendship is actually what drives her and the story, then is it really the dismantling of Ragyo’s system that restores balance to her life, and is it really Ryuko’s entrance to Honnouji Academy that sets off the plot? Is the climax of Kill la Kill actually more internal? Is it Ryuko’s full, unabashed embracing of love and friendship that ultimately restores balance, more than any physical battle?

I mean, I’ve certainly argued as much! Ryuko and Senketsu save the world through their teamwork, and their teamwork restores balance to both the world and Ryuko’s life by saving both.

But, if this is the case, then it can’t be Ryuko’s entrance into Honnouji Academy that sets off the plot. The inciting instead would instead be Ryuko’s meeting with Senketsu: Senketsu throws Ryuko’s life out of balance by forcing her to work together with someone when she’s used to being completely on her own. All Ryuko wants is love and friendship, but she has to conquer her own insecurities and self-hate to truly accept companionship. When Ryuko and Senketsu beat Ragyo in the finale, this is a representation of how Ryuko finally accepts and loves herself enough to fully accept love from others.

Maybe???

Yeah, I don’t even know anymore.

And that’s the thing: when it comes to writing advice and story structure, everything is so subjective to me. I take all writing advice---especially McKee’s---with about an ocean’s worth of salt. What works for one writer won’t work for another, and what one writer finds “good” another won’t. 

And as for story structure? You could break down a story any which way and come up with a compelling argument to support your thinking. I’m sure all my proposed “inciting incidents” for Kill la Kill---be it the death of Ryuko’s father, her entrance into Honnouji Academy, or her meeting with Senketsu---could each be argued to be the scene that ultimately “drives” the story, and all these arguments could have a boatload of evidence behind them and be perfectly valid interpretations.

And the same goes for other stories I considered while writing this book too, such as You are Umasou, a cutesy dinosaur anime movie that I examined because it does a great job of maintaining a cutesy, child-friendly tone while also explaining and never shying away from the fact that carnivores need to eat meat to survive (which is kind of what I’m going for in my story, I think). The inciting incident could be that Heart the Tyrannosaurus rex hatches to a family of herbivores, or maybe it’s when Heart realizes that he’s a carnivore and abandons his family, or maybe the inciting incident takes too long to happen and it’s when he comes across Umasou, a baby herbivore that Heart intends to eat before Umasou mistakenly thinks of Heart as his father. 

And maybe Robert McKee would say that Kill la Kill and You are Umasou are horribly-structured stories. Maybe the inciting incidents aren’t clear and the “drive” behind the stories are too hard to see. But maybe it also doesn’t matter? McKee praises the film Tender Mercies to death, but---and just coming from someone who’s seen some clips and understands the basic story---that film seems like a total snore fest. Maybe it’s basically a “perfect” story with a perfect structure, but what does that matter if nobody really likes it except for bitter film people like Robert McKee? 

In the end, I don’t really know what to think except that no matter what, there has to be something that draws people to a story. I was attracted to Kill la Kill because I liked the friendship between Ryuko and Senketsu and found it incredibly endearing. You are Umasou is sweet because it’s a story about belonging, family, and parenthood. I can’t tell you how well structured these stories are, but even if they’re badly structured, they both have something that gets people watching---Kill la Kill, after all, was a massive success, and You are Umasou, though far from as popular, does seem to be well-liked overall.

But in my own novel? There are lovely scenes, maybe---a princess finding someone she thought dead, a story-within-a-story about a beautiful empress with an ugly daughter, a family reluctantly taking in an orphaned girl, a maligned demon saving that young girl’s life. But there are too many characters to get anyone really attached to just one, and the narrative switches around so much, and if you asked me for my “back of the book” summary of the story, I would just stare at you and say, “Uhh...”

There are perhaps many possible “drives” behind Kill la Kill, but in my own work, it seems I struggle with finding just one. More and more, I feel like McKee’s report for rejected scripts (18):

Nice description, actable dialogue. Some amusing moments; some sensitive moments. All in all, a script of well-chosen words. The story, however, sucks. The first thirty pages crawl on a fat belly of exposition; the rest never get to their feet. The main plot, what there is of it, is riddled with convenient coincidence and weak motivation. No discernible protagonist. Unrelated tensions that could shape into subplots never do. Characters are never revealed to be more than they seem. Not a moment’s insight into the inner lives of these people or their society. It’s a lifeless collection of predictable, ill-told, and cliched episodes that wander off into a pointless haze. PASS ON IT.

And even all the notecards and crayons and research books in the world can’t seem to help me do the most basic thing a writer should be able to do: write a story.