Before all hell breaks loose, your protagonist is on the couch. Maybe not an actual couch, but their usual spot: the routine, the excuses, the “I’ll get to it.” It’s not great, but it’s comfortable enough. In Wake the Dragon, that’s “Nothing to See Here (Yet)”.
Then something happens. The phone rings, a letter shows up, there’s a body in the garden, or a dragon egg goes missing. All hell breaks loose. From that point on, staying on the couch is off the table.
Different names, same moment
Wake the Dragon calls it “All Hell Breaks Loose”. Three-act structure calls it the inciting incident. The hero’s journey calls it the call to adventure. The label changes, but the moment doesn’t: the event that breaks the routine and gets the story moving.
It usually lands early, around 10% of the way into the book. Just enough time for us to see what life was like before, and to care a little when it falls apart.
In Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, it goes like this: on Sunday morning, the glass case in the square is empty. The dragon egg Valdrago has kept on display for three hundred years is gone. And the only person in town without an alibi is Mara, the librarian who moved there a year ago.
That moment gets three things right. Let’s look at them.
Concrete: you could film it
A good “All Hell Breaks Loose” is something you can see. If you set up a camera in the square that Sunday, you’d get the empty case, a crowd of neighbors and somebody pointing toward the library.
Compare that with “Mara starts to feel that something’s off in town.” It might be true, but you can’t film it. And what you can’t film is very hard to write, because you don’t know what scene to build around it.
Hint: if what you’ve written down is a feeling, look for the event that causes it. The feeling will follow on its own.
Not chosen: it happens to them
This lands on your protagonist. Mara doesn’t decide that the egg gets stolen. She doesn’t even decide to be accused. One Sunday, it just happens to her.
This matters because of what comes next. Behind it there’s usually a stretch of hesitation, “Somebody Else’s Job”: does she lock herself in the library and wait for someone else to sort it out, or start digging? Only then comes “No Turning Back”, the decision, and that part is hers. If the event were already a choice, you’d skip the hesitation and the decision would lose its punch.
First life pushes. Then the character decides what to do with the push.
No going back
Whatever breaks loose can’t be put back. Even if the egg turned up on Monday in a drawer somewhere, the whole town has already looked at Mara that way. You can’t unsee that.
An event that can be fixed with a phone call or an apology is really a setback. Useful, but it won’t start a novel.
Hint: ask yourself what would happen if your protagonist just ignored it. If the answer is “nothing much,” raise the stakes.
Even better if it hits a sore spot
This isn’t required, but it helps a lot. Mara believes a lie: “I’ll never really be from here.” And the event goes straight for it: out of everyone in Valdrago, the suspect is the outsider. It’s as if the town were saying out loud what she was already afraid of.
When what breaks loose touches the character’s lie, the outside plot and the inside one start at the same time. That saves you a lot of work later: at the end, in “Go Big or Go Home”, it’s worth looking at this piece again, because the answer is usually here.
The two most common mistakes
It comes too late. Chapter seven, and your protagonist is still having breakfast. Totally understandable: you love this world and want to show it properly. But readers are waiting for something to happen, and their patience runs out eventually. If “Nothing to See Here” keeps stretching, look at what the reader learns in each early scene. The ones that add nothing new can be trimmed, or moved after the event, where what they show carries more weight.
It’s too vague. “Things start to change.” “They get some troubling news.” What things? What news? A vague event makes for a vague opening, because nobody, not even you, quite knows what’s at stake. Give it a name, a place and a time. “On Sunday morning, the case is empty” is much easier to write than “a mysterious theft occurs.”
There’s a third one, less common: the huge event that doesn’t touch your protagonist. A meteor hits the town, sure, but your character is away on vacation and carries on as usual. Big doesn’t help if it doesn’t make them move.
For today
Write your “All Hell Breaks Loose” in a single line, one you could film. Then run it through the three questions: can you see it? Does it happen to them instead of being chosen? Can it be undone? If it fails one, tweak it until it doesn’t.
In Sunday Plot it lives in Structure, in the “All Hell Breaks Loose” piece (or Inciting Incident, or The Call to Adventure, depending on your template), and guided mode asks about it early because it pulls the rest along. If it’s still blurry, mark it “I don’t know yet.” The couch can wait one more day.