One of the more misunderstood sections of the script – the Refusal of the Call!
Day 1: Writing a Teaser
Day 2: Introducing Your Hero
Day 3: Setting up Your Hero’s Life
Day 8: Keeping Your Scenes Entertaining
Day 9: The Inciting Incident
So yesterday we dealt with the inciting incident, which typically takes place between pages 12-15. If you’re doing your math correctly, you know that there’s still 10 pages left before the end of your first act (page 25). Once you reach the second act, your character will go off on their journey, whether it’s to destroy the one ring, find the killer, win the big match, take down the Nazis, find the treasure, get their dream man, or whatever their goal is.
So the question is, what do you in the meantime? What do you do between pages 15-25? I recently watched a handful of first acts and I realized that the answer to that question isn’t as cut and dried as you’d think. Because, traditionally, this section is known as the “Refusal of the Call” section. But not every movie uses it for that purpose.
The idea behind the “Refusal of the Call” is that your hero has just had their life upended by the inciting incident. That’s a jarring moment for them. Imagine that you learned all of your life savings, which you’d been saving up for 25 years, was gone. You unknowingly invested it in a Ponzi scheme, which just got exposed.
It’s unlikely, mere minutes after you learned this, that you would hop into action and start hiring lawyers to try and get all your money back. Instead, you would probably be in shock. You would need a couple days before you could process what was going on. That’s how I want you to see the Refusal of the Call. It’s not so much an artificially constructed moment where the hero says, “I’m not going on this mission because there’s still 10 pages left in the act!” It’s an organic moment where the character struggles to comprehend what’s just happened.
In this moment, a character is motivated by shock, by fear, by the amount of work it will take to go on this journey. So their initial reaction is always going to be, “No thank you.” But then there comes a secondary development where it makes less sense to stay than it does to go. So your hero goes.
Unfortunately, I’ve found that every movie treats this section differently and I suspect it’s because the average screenwriter knows about act breaks and the inciting incident, but not much else. So a lot of writers will fudge this section. With that said, it usually doesn’t affect the movie because it’s only ten pages and we know, at the end of those pages, we arrive at the beginning of the adventure.
However, I did have a helpful realization when watching these first acts, which was, if the inciting incident lines up with your hero’s job, it doesn’t make sense for the hero to refuse the call. For example, Indiana Jones looks for ancient antiquities. Therefore, when his inciting incident comes (the government wants to hire him to find the Ark of the Covenant), it makes zero sense for him to say no. This is what he does. It’s his job. So of course he’s going to say yes.
Contrast this with Star Wars, where the inciting incident is Obi-Wan prompting R-2 to play Leia’s message, where she asks him to take R2 to Alderran. Traveling across the galaxy avoiding the Empire is not Luke’s job. Luke is a farmer. So it makes more sense for Luke to refuse the call, which he does.
Okay, so now that we know what the Refusal of the Call is, what do we do with those 10 pages? I hate to be vague, but while doing my research, I found you have all sorts of options with these pages. If we’re sticking to the letter of the law, a hero who doesn’t refuse the call (Indiana Jones) will have one or two prep scenes before going on the journey. For a hero who does refuse the call, they will enter a state of stasis, like I talked about above. They’re in shock. They’re in denial. We may show them trying to go back to their lives. But then a secondary event will happen (Luke’s aunt and uncle are killed) that forces them to go on the journey.
With that said, here are some first acts I watched where the refusal of the call was a little confusing.
First, I watched Crazy Stupid Love. This is the Steve Carrell (who plays Cal) movie where a family man is forced back onto the singles scene. The inciting incident actually occurs on page 4. That’s when Cal’s wife, Emily, tells him that she cheated on him and wants a divorce.
This creates a giant 20 page chasm before the end of the first act. So what do we do in that time? Well, Cal goes into a state of stasis. He’s in denial. He doesn’t understand a world where he’s not married. He drinks. He mopes. So he’s doing the proper “refusal of the call” checklist. But what I realized was that Crazy Stupid Love has a ton of characters to set up. It has to set up Jacob (Ryan Gosling), Cal’s daughter, Hannah (Emma Stone), the babysitter, the son, the wife. All of these characters have intricate storylines that need a lot of setup. So we’re cutting away to a lot of those characters, which easily fills up the time between inciting incident and second act. But, finally, on page 25, Jacob starts teaching Cal how to be a cool single guy, meaning we’re officially in the second act.
This is a long way of saying, the time between your inciting incident and second act can be used to set up other characters in their own scenes, away from the main character. We don’t always have to stay with the main character. This could also be a good place to introduce your antagonist. As long as your general theme of the page 15-25 section is stasis or resistance (from your main character), you’re good.
Another first act I watched was Shazam! And this one was a tough nut to crack because it doesn’t create the inciting incident moment you’d expect, which is for Billy Batson to find the costume and become Shazam. Instead, at minute 15, Billy, who’s an orphan without a home, is caught by the cops and placed into a foster care home with eight other orphans. So it’s really more of a character-driven inciting incident than it is a plot-driven one.
But the movie does embrace the refusal of the call. Billy is already planning his escape less than five minutes after he arrives at the home. On the first day of school, however, he’s attacked by bullies, runs for it, gets on the train, and the train goes into another dimension where he arrives at the Shazam cave and is turned into Shazam (at minute 30).
What I’m learning from watching these films is that the more key characters there are, the harder it is to line every plot beat up where it’s supposed to be. Because you have to cut away to 2, 3, sometimes 4 different characters and set up their storylines separate from your hero. That takes up pages, which is what screws up the model. That’s what happened with Shazam. They had to set up the Shazam god in the opener, then the main villain, the orphan family, the handicapped step-brother, Freddy. It was too much to deal with and stay on schedule.
Next up we have The Conjuring and boy was this one wonky. The story follows Roger and Carolyn who move into a new farm house with their family, only to learn that it’s haunted. In any “haunted house” movie, the inciting incident will be the homeowners realizing the house is haunted. That’s obvious.
But The Conjuring does this weird parallel co-heroes thing where, throughout the first act, we’re spending just as much time with Lorraine and Ed Warren, the ghost-hunters, as we are Roger and Carolyn. This pushes all of the haunted house plot beats back, making it hard to identify where the actual inciting incident is.
I would argue that it occurs at minute 15 when they find their dog dead. But they don’t necessarily know the house is haunted yet so I’m not convinced it is the inciting incident. To the screenplay’s credit, it keeps introducing scary moments that make us want to read more. For example, we get the famous blindfolded hide-and-go-seek game. We get the scene with the kids in their bedroom and one of them is telling the other that there’s someone standing right behind them, even though we can’t see anyone.
If I’m to take anything from that, it would be, as long as you keep dangling delicious carrots in front of the audience, they’ll want to keep watching, which will allow you to introduce your major plot points later than usual. But I would be careful about this. The Conjuring script never had to win a single reader over. It was developed in-house. Your script will need to win readers over, so the sooner you can hit those plot beats, like the inciting incident, the better.
That means aiming for a page 15, or slightly sooner, inciting incident. And then ten pages of stasis, reluctance, denial, as well as introducing other major characters in the script. It just feels right for the audience to have those scenes where the hero doesn’t want to go on the adventure. Because then the audience is thinking, “Oh no. What if they don’t go??” That doubt is what makes them finally agreeing to go on the journey that much more exciting.
I don’t want to downplay that last part because I think it’s the reason they invented the refusal of the call in the first place. A movie is supposed to take the audience on an emotional journey. That makes you take them all the way up, then all the way down, then back up, then down, up, down, up, down. Without the refusal of the call, we rob the audience of one of those big emotional swings. And those swings are powerful. Big emotional sways are what get people addicted to things.
Okay, that’s it for this week. I hope you guys are all cooking along. Keep asking questions in the comments. Upvote questions you want answered. I will get to those in week 4.
Have a magical writing weekend!
Next First Act Post: Monday, March 14
Pages to write until next post: 5-6
Pages you should have completed by Monday: 20
