Bringing the best books back to life
William Wallace Cook’s plot-suggestion system, Plotto, is woefully misunderstood, even by some of its biggest fans. Let’s take of three of the most basic mistakes that will prevent you from getting the most out of this wonderful plotting aid for writers and screenwriters.
At first glance, all plot suggestions in Plotto seem either too vague or too specific. The vague ones can be a bit of a puzzler, but the too-specific ones are easier to work with.
by William Wallace Cook
Norton Creek Press. 58 pages. ISBN 1938099044.
The Plotto plot suggestion system has a largely undeserved reputation for being hard to use, because the instructions in the book itself are confusing. But we have a fix for that!
Plotto’s author, William Wallace Cook, developed a short course in using Plotto, and wrote this Plotto Instruction Booklet as its text. Once you work through the seven short lessons in this slim 58-page booklet, you have mastered the Plotto system and can confidently and efficiently use it to help create plots, subplots, and situations for your short stories, novels, and scripts.
This essential Plotto Instruction Booklet is compatible with all editions of Plotto:
Fans of Plotto should also read Cook’s book about his writing career, The Fiction Factory, also published by Norton Creek Press.
by William Wallace Cook
(writing under the alias John Milton Edwards)
Norton Creek Press, 182 pages. ISBN 0981928498.
William Wallace Cook was a famously prolific writer, turning out so much pulp fiction that he was called “the man who deforested Canada.”
Best remembered today for his plot-generation book, Plotto, Cook (writing under the pseudonym John Milton Edwards, also chronicled his first two decades as a high-volume pulp writer, in his book, The Fiction Factory. He tells how he got started as a fiction writer and the ups and downs of freelancing at the turn of the last century.
In addition to being fascinating reading in its own right, the book shows how much harder writing used to be. Cook was not only an early adopter of the typewriter, gratefully abandoning his fountain pen, but also of the index-card-based filing system, which made his precious collection of background material (newspaper and magazine clippings) far more accessible.
There’s no better chronicle of an author writing quickly and with increasing ease, year after year.
This Norton Creek Press edition is an exact reproduction of the 1912 original edition.
“This is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve had so many people try to buy this from me … and steal this from me.”
Even today, a lifetime after pulp fiction vanished as a category, people have trouble deciding what to think about it, since it isn’t lofty and highbrow the way “serious fiction” is supposed to be. But while serious fiction was mostly written by people who made their living doing something else, pulp fiction provided the livelihood for many writers. In terms of price per word, it paid poorly, so speed and volume were required—without sacrificing quality—for anyone making a go of it.
Cook was a good example of a twentieth-century writer, and one of the few who became one during the nineteenth century. He kept his stories moving along at a brisk pace and filled them with incident rather than ornament, keeping the readers engaged and bringing them back for more. Since pulp fiction consisted almost entirely of periodicals, motivating readers to buy not just this issue, but the next one, was all-important.
Born in Michigan, Cook spent some years in Arizona for his health, and the Old West ambiance he soaked up there allowed him to become a much-sought-after writer of Westerns. His interest in technology no doubt was the source of his science fiction novels, such as “A Round Trip to the Year 2000,” written before SF was an established genre. And it will come as no surprise that Cook wrote screenplays for some very early silent movies, starting in 1912 with “It All Came Out in the Wash.”
Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, and its author, William Wallace Cook, were recently featured on BBC Radio, in a program called “Miles Jupp and the Plot Device.” Listen to it here.
Jupp goes into Cook’s tremendously prolific writing life, the difficulty of getting a copy of the original printing of Plotto, and the fact that Plotto does not drop a finished plot into your lap, but takes some effort to master. (Cook later wrote a Plotto instruction manual to clarify how to use the book, which I’ve posted to this site.)
Jupp also discusses Plotto’s influence on at least one other writer, Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of Perry Mason. Every story introduced a new crime and new characters, which required a new plot.
How prolific was William Wallace Cook? At one point he worked with one, two, or even three stenographers at the same time, dictating one story to each in rotation, and filling in any gaps by sitting down at his typewriter and working on a different story.
Is Plotto a magic plotting device? I think it is, sort of. It’s not going to write your novel for you, but when I took Linda Hamner’s excellent scriptwriting course, it was clear that any movie has enough twists and turns to cause serious brain-freeze, and a TV series or a novel is even more daunting. Personally, I think Plotto is a magic device for subplots, especially if you expect not to cut ’em out and paste ’em down, but to use them as a starting point, or even just to jog your brain into coming up with something better.
by William Wallace Cook
Norton Creek Press, August 2011, 308 pages. ISBN 0981928471.
Have you struggled to expand your initial idea into a complete story? Plotting can be frustrating work! What if there were a tool for this very problem, so you could navigate these uncharted waters as quickly as possible? A tool that starts with what you have (a situation, perhaps, or a group of characters) and sets you on the road to new possibilities?
Plotto does all this. Created by a master of “organized creativity,” William Wallace Cook (one of the most prolific writers in history), Plotto has been prized by professional authors and screenwriters since its publication in 1928, and is still in demand today, with copies of the original edition selling for up to $400.