I am 18 years old and cruising along in my 1987 Ford Meteor. I’m listening to Blink 182 on repeat and I’m heading to the beach on a hot December day. Out of nowhere a modern white Toyota van collides with me. My car spins 360 degrees, my chest slams the steering wheel, and my neck cracks.  

It was a horrific head on collision at a traffic lights that was not my fault. 

I wake confused and in pain. The paramedics strap me down and tell me not to move my body until we get to hospital. For 7 hours I lay flat in the hospital gurney alone, locked to the bed, with a possible broken neck, awaiting results from the doctor’s tests.  

So many crazy thoughts run through my brain - Will I be able to walk again? What would my life be like as a paraplegic? Would I still be able to get a girlfriend? Could I become filmmaker?  

At the end of a full stressful day in the emergency room, my tests were all good. I had bad bruising but, unbelievably, no breaks.   My life changed.  

I started living life more to the full. I took more chances. Partied hard, took up a new sport, created films, went to more live gigs, asked girls out.

My car was a write-off so I bought an old 1976 Holden Kingswood and named her Holly.  

I chose this car partly because it was the vintage punk look that I was going for and partly because I knew this tonne of steel pounding the highways would scare others in their brand-new cars.  

The car accident changed the way I saw myself driving. I now had to add a layer of protection around me, so I picked a car that was huge.  

If I were a protagonist in a film, this would have been my inciting incident. 

An inciting incident is the moment in the story that something happens to our main character and then they must decide what they are going to do about it. That decision creates the rest of the journey of the film.  

It must be big, huge, colossal (size does matter when talking about an inciting incident). It happens when Lillian announces to her best friend Annie in Bridesmaids that she is getting married or when Sylvester Stallone is reawakened in the peaceful future to save the world from a violent enemy in Demolition Man or when an argumentative couple get left in shark infested ocean by their tour guide in Open Water. 

These are the moments in a story that hook us into watching a film and munching on that popcorn. It must happen by the 12th minute otherwise my advice is – spit out that popcorn and stop watching!  

This may sound clinical when we are talking about a creative story like a film. However, film needs this moment in the story to happen which turns everything on its head for the protagonist and makes the audience lean back into their recliner chairs and go “Oh argh, yeah, what happens next?” 

As a filmmaker and scriptwriter this was such a massive “argh-ha” for me when I learnt what an inciting incident is and how it should be used as a tool in authoring incredible stories. 

Now when I watch a film, I am really expecting a great inciting incident, otherwise why watch?  

I bug my wife when we watch films because if it is feeling like it is going on a little bit too long without an inciting incident, I will give her the raised eyebrow. She shirks as I hover the remote over the film’s viewing time. If it has gone well past 12 minutes and there is no inciting incident, it is hard for me to continue to watch the film because "what are the stakes?” 

When I was younger, I would continue to watch the film. I was and am such a lover of film that I would give it full faith that it would get better and better, but it never would and by the end the film would make me feel terrible. I would then wish I could get that 2 hours of my life back. 

Now I am wiser to this inciting incident idea that when a movie does not have a strong inciting incident, I stop the movie.  

I do not want to waste my life with a film with no inciting incident.  

I want to see characters deciding what to do when suddenly they are stuck in shark infested waters or breaking their best friend’s heart or waking up in a peaceful future which has been rudely interrupted by a violent 90s serial killer.  

Do you?