Category: Writing

Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes

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.

Mistake 1: Taking Plot Hints Literally

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.

Let’s look at conflict #1419(a):

A, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.

This sounds a bit fantastic, but that’s not the problem, because it’s listed under “Occult and Fantastic” conflicts. No, the real problem is that readers often think you’re supposed to cut this conflict out and paste it down as-is, when, actually, you’re not supposed to. It’s only an example.

An example of what? Basically, of a situation featuring a self-operating killing machine that our hero escapes on his own, with the aid of a minor flaw in its operation.

Far-fetched? Hardly. This plot has been used before, in stories we’ve all heard of.

Real Stories Using This Plot

  • The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe, where the attention of rats and the slicing action of the pendulum itself allow the protagonist to roll out of its way.
  • Androcles and the Lion, by Aesop, where the reliably savage man-eating lion turns out to have a mind of its own, and chooses not to kill his old friend.
  • Partial credit for the laser scene in Goldfinger, though Bond talks his way out instead of doing it right, with a mirror or something.

Mistake 2: Not Understanding the Masterplot Table

Any A Clause may be used in conjunction with any B Clause and with Any C Clause.
—Plotto, page 17

Most people, when they look at Plotto, notice that, if you read across the top of the Materplot table, the protagonist A clauses, the conflict B clauses, and the terminal C clauses seem to go together. And they do. Cook arranged them this way for convenience, so the most common A-B-C combinations will be close to each other.

For example, about the first Masterplot you encounter will be:

  • A1. A person in love,
  • B1. Engaging in a difficult enterprise when promised a reward for high achievement,
  • C1. Pays a grim penalty in an unfortunate undertaking.

 

But it’s only for convenience. You can just as easily take a B and C clauses from different regions of the table, like this:

  • A1. A person in love,
  • B59. Engaging in an enterprise and becoming involved with the occult and fantastic,
  • C8. Achieves a spiritual victory.

Most people don’t even realize that this is possible! In fact, at least two editions of Plotto (the Tin House Books Kindle edition, and Ashleywilde’s Plots Unlimited, format the Masterplot table according to the usual misinterpretation, making it less likely that you’ll ever figure out that you can use it the way it’s meant to be used, an an any-to-any manner, like my example above.

My own Norton Creek Press edition of Plotto avoids this problem, since is an exact duplicate of the original edition. But it introduces a less fatal form of confusion, since the book is supposed to use half-width pages for the B clauses, but neither my edition nor later press runs of the original edition do this (it’s not technically feasible with the printing process I used).

Basically, all you need to know is “pick any clauses you like from the A, B, and C columns.”

 

Mistake 3. Not Reading the Plotto Instruction Booklet

Pretty much the moment Plotto hit the presses, Cook realized that most readers couldn’t understand it, so he created a seven-lesson instruction course in the form of a Plotto Instruction Booklet. You need this instruction booklet!

Original copies of the booklet are extremely hard to find, though sometimes a old copy of Plotto will include one, perhaps tucked in a pouch on the inside front cover.

I’ve republished the Plotto Instruction Booklet as a stand-alone title (in paperback and Kindle form). Tin House Books includes it at the back of their edition of Plotto (too bad—it should be in the front).

You can use the Plotto Instruction Booklet with:

  • Original copies of Plotto, printed by Ellis Publishing company between 1928 and 1941.
  • The Norton Creek Press edition of Plotto.
  • Plots Unlimited, printed by Ashleywilde. (Plots Unlimited is a bowdlerized version of Plotto.)

There you have it. Three things you can do to turn your Plotto-ing around.

 

 

Plotto Instruction Booklet

Master the Plotto System in Seven Lessons

Plotto Instruction Booklet by William Wallace Cook. Norton Creek Press
Buy Now.

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.

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The Fiction Factory

Being the Experience of a Writer who, For Twenty-Two Years, has kept a Story-Mill Grinding Successfully

The Fiction Factory by William Wallace Cook (alias John Milton Edwards) Norton Creek Press
Buy Now.

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.

Jerry Lentz Video Review of The Fiction Factory (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.”

A Note About Pulp Fiction

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.

About William Wallace Cook

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.”

How to Order

William Wallace Cook’s Plotto Featured on BBC

plotto_cover250Plotto: 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.

Plotto

The Classic Plot Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction

plotto_cover250
Buy Now.

by William Wallace Cook
Norton Creek Press, August 2011, 308 pages. Suggested retail price, $17.99. 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.

Warning #1: It Uses Small Type

This Norton Creek Edition is an exact reproduction of Cook’s original edition. (Sadly, the original edition used annoyingly small print to keep it down to 300 pages, so be warned.)

Warning #2: It Takes Getting Used To

Cook uses a telegraphic format that takes some getting used to, so working your way carefully through the introduction and its examples is the key to professional-quality results. This gives enough people trouble that he eventually published the Plotto Instruction Booklet, which I recommend you buy along with Plotto.

Warning #3: It’s Politically Incorrect

Because Plotto was written in the 1920s, its situations are seriously old-fashioned, and its terminology is politically incorrect—sometimes startlingly so. This matters less than you’d think because you were going to file off the serial numbers and customize the situations anyway.

For example, Cook himself wrote both westerns and early classics of science fiction, so you see how replacing “stagecoach” with “star ship” and “dance hall girl” with “male stripper” are within the reach of anyone using the Plotto system. In fact, this kind of substitution is how the book is intended to be used, and is the key to its flexibility and enduring popularity.

A Note From Robert Plamondon

I first heard of Plotto in the late Eighties, when a technical writer friend of mine told me about it. In spite of having been out of print for many decades, Plotto was so legendary that everyone but me seemed to know of its existence! Few had ever seen a copy, though.

Finding rare books was difficult in the pre-Internet age, but the owner of the Antiquarian Archive in Sunnyvale had heard of Plotto and managed to find a copy for me at another store for a mere $130—which was (and is) a good price for a nice copy of the original edition. It was the most expensive book I’d ever bought at the time, and I was not disappointed.

I didn’t know what to expect from Plotto. For those who have never seen Plotto, the closest I can come is Roget’s Thesaurus in its original, non-dictionary format, which is arranged to put similar concepts next to each other. If you don’t find what you’re looking for on the first go, you can scan the adjacent entries and often realize that what you were looking for wasn’t really what you wanted anyway. Close, but no cigar, and what you really needed was within a page or two.

Plotto is like that. Sometimes you strike pay dirt right away, sometimes you have some false starts, and sometimes a “false start” suddenly clicks a while later, after you’ve dismissed it as unworkable. It works not by giving you ideas on a silver platter, but by bouncing ideas off you in a structured way, until one clicks.

One thing about Plotto is that it can seem both too vague and too specific. The “masterplots,” which are very high-level plot descriptions, are too high-level to have much “zing” and need to be fleshed out. The main section of the book provides this fleshing-out process, and sometimes it can seem too specific, For example it might suggest a plot having to do with hidden gold dust buried by a Forty-Niner, when you were intending to write a science fiction story!

All is not lost, since the whole point of Plotto is not to rehash old stories but to come up with new ones, and your SF story can easily accommodate a quite similar plot element, with someone who fits your future society hiding something of value. You’re expected to make this kind of change, so don’t let the details put you off! I actually find the specific suggestions easier to work with than the general ones, because they seem more human somehow, and changing details is easier than making them up out of whole cloth.

Alas, my fiction-writing career has not yet propelled me on to fame and fortune (though I’m proud of my SF novel, One Survivor), so I can’t make any extravagant claims about Plotto’s role in my success. But when it happens to you, be sure to let me know!

Keep in mind that Plotto is doubly indexed: first with the “Chinese Menu” of three columns, starting on page 12, and again by the main characters, starting on page 191. So if you’re looking for an idea involving a man and his daughter, you’d look it up in the index on page 191 and be referred to the situations on page 292. Whether you start with situations or characters, Plotto is the tool for you.

Get the Plotto Instruction Booklet!

Plotto Instruction Booklet by William Wallace Cook. Norton Creek Press
Buy on Amazon.

Cook also wrote a detailed instruction booklet on how to use Plotto, covering its concepts in seven lessons, giving considerably greater detail than he did in the book itself. This booklet is a must-have: the difference between success and failure. Norton Creek Press has reprinted the Plotto Instruction Booklet.

More About How to Use Plotto

See my blog article: Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes

About William Wallace Cook

The Fiction Factory by William Wallace Cook (alias John Milton Edwards) Norton Creek PressCook’s fiction output was so prolific that he was called “the man who deforested Canada.” He was an early adopter of many then-new technologies. He was one of the first writers to compose on a typewriter and to use card files to index an enormous collection of magazine and newspaper clippings. Plotto is an extension of Cook’s passion for efficiency and method in writing.

Norton Creek Press has also published Cook’s autobiography, The Fiction Factory, (under the pseudonym of John Milton Edwards), which covers the first half of his writing career in detail. Born in Michigan, at one point he moved to 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 this means that it will come as no surprise that Cook wrote screenplays for early silent movies, starting in 1912 with “It All Came Out in the Wash.”

Cook published Plotto in 1928, towards the end of his life, making it his gift to new generations of writers. The same edition has been published with three different subtitles:

  • Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction
  • Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
  • Plotto: The Classic Plot Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction

All three have identical contents except for the last, the Norton Creek Press edition, which has a new Foreword by Robert Plamondon and is otherwise an exact reproduction.

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