The Five Commandments of Storytelling

The five commandments are the things that everybody intuitively already knows. These are the foundation of every story from a ok to, you know, a 25 novel epoch. The inciting incident is a thing, it's a cause or coincidence that throws the life of character, or characters, out of balance. A causal inciting incident would be something that is caused by another person. And so the inciting incident pushes a character into trying to get back to the place they were before. That's the key thing that starts every story.