The Inciting Incident: Where does it belong?

I attended a webinar recently by a literary agent who talked about creating first pages that sizzle.  I always enjoy these conversations - not only does it make me revisit information I usually already know and probably need to think about again, but it makes me look at the craft of writing in new ways.

One of the topics that came up during the webinar was the inciting incident. The hook, if you will.  As chance would have it, my teenage daughter and I had been talking the night before about 'the hook' in a book. She was reading a bestselling YA novel that she termed 'boring'. (We all can't love everything.) So, we were chatting about why that was and she said 'I need to be hooked in the first 20 pages.' Which I agreed with.  As memory served me, I'd been taught that the inciting incident, or the hook, should occur in the first 10 to 30 pages.

Well, when I was attending the webinar the next day, the agent insisted that the inciting incident needed to occur in the first THREE pages to hook her. Huh?  Did I hear her right? A writer friend of mine attended the webinar also and we talked about setting the hook in the first 3 pages versus the first 30 pages.  But what about the characters? we said.  Don't we need to care about them before something happens?  

At the time, I was working on a YA contemporary novel where the hook occurred about page 8. I thought, what the heck, I'll try to tighten that up and see if I can get to it by page 3. And I did. And guess what?  It was better. I didn't miss any of the writing that I had cut. It forced me to make every word count.

Today I was reading STEIN ON WRITING, intending to read up on characterization and came across this:

"Some years ago I was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in mid-Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book's jacket and then go to page one.  No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample." -Sol Stein

And I thought about my behavior in a bookstore. That is *exactly* what I do. I know by the first two or three pages if I want to read that book or not. If I am so intrigued that I have to read that book.

What do you think? Does the inciting incident need to be in the first three pages? Or can it wait until page 12 or 20 or even page 30?  Let's chat!

~Kiki