: Inciting incident in Fantasy In my fantasy story, there is about 10,000 words before the inciting incident. I originally intended to land the end of my story at about 40,000 words. This is

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If you keep the reader engaged, and provide them enough interesting aspects of the story and a strong hook, then the II occurring at 10K probably won't be a problem.

One thing I would recommend, though, is allowing yourself the luxury of writing the story to the story's requirement, rather than a word count. If the movement of the story goes longer than 40K, let it. If it comes in shorter, you might have to look at where the II is, but again, if you have a strong hook to draw the reader in, you should be fine.

Hope that helps a little, and all success!

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I don't think it's necessarily what's common. It's more about what you want to do. As long as your bridging conflicts are engaging and your characters are given goals and pre-arcs, and are characterized in an engaging way during the setup, you should have no problem with this. I know that in Jaws (even though it isn't a fantasy), the author gives us the backstory dump on every single character, but he does it in such a way that helps us readers understand their motives. So while world building, you might want to characterize simultaneously. Good luck!

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