I Bought Eggs is Not a Story
Knowing the WHY of your story moves you from reporter to novelist
“I bought eggs,” is not a story.
Even if we throw a few characters into the mix, and you tell me that you and James went to a farm stand to get fresh eggs on the way to my house and you bought them from the millennial chick with purple hair and a sleeve tattoo, who left her job at a nonprofit in DC to come back home and restart the family farm, it still isn’t a story. It is a report. You bought eggs. James went with you. The millennial chick sold them to you at the stand on her family farm. So far, that isn’t a story because there is nothing at stake for either the teller or the listener.
It’s when we add the why– the reason for telling the story — that a report becomes a story.
“On the way home, I stopped at the farm stand that the millennial chick from DC runs to get those eggs you like, but she was out and . . .
CC interrupted him, “Out of eggs or out, away from the stand?”
“Wait,” he puts up his hand. “Trust me, this gets good. This morning, around 6:00 when the millennial chick . . .”
“Oh, so she was there. You have got to find out her name.”
James threw her a look. CC was always interrupting. “This morning, when the millennial chick, whose name I can’t remember, was gathering eggs, four blacked out trucks with strange markings on the side pulled up. Some guys got out, flashed her badges, and told her they had to confiscate all the eggs.”
“All of them?”
“Yep, every last one. The guys in the truck gave her a ‘super legal looking document’ and told her she had to surrender all her chickens too.”
“Seriously? All her chickens? Are you making this shit up?” CC turned from the sink and wiped her hands. He’d finally gotten her attention.
“No. It gets even weirder. She told them to wait while she called the sheriff. But they didn’t wait. By the time she came back outside, they had cleaned out all chickens and even taken all the straw from the coops and sprayed something blue in a ten-foot radius around the coops. After they left, she called around to other farms in the area, and found out the same thing is happening all across the state, as far south as Montgomery, she said.”
James cocked his head toward the TV on the counter, “An unknown virus is spreading through chickens throughout the Southeast.”
CC picked up the remote and turned up the volume. “The virus causes rapid breathing, chest pains, and headaches resulting in blindness. The symptoms mimic heart attacks or a stroke coming on very quickly and killing the infected person within hours of the first sign of pain or difficulty breathing. The virus is believed to have killed 37 people so far, and the count is expected to rise. Doctors at the CDC believe there is a link to the deaths and a virus found in chickens. Authorities are confiscating birds and eggs in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee and expect they will have to eliminate more chickens before the virus is contained. If you have eggs in your refrigerator, we urge you to call the CDC immediately. We will scroll the number for the CDC throughout this broadcast.”
James opened the fridge and peered in. There next to the milk and a half-eaten pie sat an ominous bowl of eggs.
He picked up his phone and started dialing the number running along the bottom of the screen.
“Something about this isn’t right,” he said as he hit dial.
CC eyes lingered on his UAB hospital badge and the scrubs he wore on rounds.
Now,we have a story. A virus linked to chickens is killing people. A doctor who isn’t buying the news report is telling the whole story. Developing, distinct characters. And we are asking — Why were the chickens taken and destroyed? How did the virus start? Is it killing everyone or just some people? What happens next? Will James be the one to figure this out?
Who wants a boring sheet cake when they can have this?
Without knowing the why we have a flat story. With a clearly defined why, we can begin to layer more detail onto this scene — place, time, and other specifics — but without the WHY of the virus, all the other details wouldn’t matter. We simply have people talking about buying eggs.
Whether you are writing literary fiction or historical fiction, police procedural or YA, before readers can fully invest in reading your story, to get them past the first fifteen pages, you need to show them why they are reading. And before you begin to write, you need to have a clearly defined reason why you are writing the story you are writing. Are you exploring a story about a character who: takes the wrong job, finds a letter that upends their world, gives up her life for her sister, refuses to embrace slavery, or dies and is brought back to life? You need to know that before you begin writing.
In the case of the story about a virus and the eggs, perhaps the writer wants to explore what happens when a young doctor faces a killer virus. But to tell that story we have to have a place for the story to begin — unidentified men confiscating chickens and eggs in three states. Why? Because by having James tell us that story, we place the virus at the beginning of our novel. The why and the inciting incident become inextricably linked. As a writer, you need to know why you are telling the story are telling. And, why you started, where you did.
Shawn Coyne author of The Story Grid, puts it this way,
“without an inciting incident, a writer has nothing…just a collection of riffs that don’t add up in any coherent way…character sketches or meticulous Proustian descriptions of inanimate objects that have zero emotional payoff.”
Once you have decided on the why– I want to tell a story about a killer virus and a young doctor — then you need a way into the story, an inciting incident that will allow you to build complications to move the story along. Once James becomes aware of the killer virus, we need a reason for him to move from believing that he is too inexperienced, too busy with work, or too removed from the situation to help — and see the moment he decides to take action.
Now, there are multiple directions we can take this story. The phone could ring, and James’ superior could call him back to the hospital. James could have a friend at the CDC who worked on the last bird flu, but when he calls him to find out what is going on, James discovers his friend is dead and was one of the first people to die from this new virus. CC could have eaten some of the eggs in the fridge, and by the next morning, she too could be dead, spurring James on to find the cure and the origin of this deadly virus. Where the story goes, depends upon the inciting incident.
The inciting incident gives the reader and the writer a way into the story. It points to who has the most at stake. And most of the time, it will introduce us to the most important characters in the story.
We’ll talk more about ways to define the why of your story and determinging your inciting incident in the next post.
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Sandra O’Donnell is the author of Your First Fifteen Pages. She’s read hundreds of queries and has a passion for helping writers create stories that connect with agents, publishers, and readers.
