{"id":537,"date":"2016-05-21T21:00:23","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/?p=537"},"modified":"2026-10-24T16:04:46","modified_gmt":"2026-10-24T23:04:46","slug":"plotto-avoid-two-huge-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/plotto-avoid-two-huge-mistakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>William Wallace Cook&#8217;s plot-suggestion system, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto<\/a>, is woefully misunderstood, even by some of its biggest fans. Let&#8217;s take of three\u00a0of the most basic mistakes that will prevent you from getting the most out of this wonderful\u00a0plotting aid for writers and screenwriters.<\/p>\n<h1>Mistake 1: Taking Plot Hints Literally<\/h1>\n<p>At first glance, all plot suggestions in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look at conflict #1419(a):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A, caught in a trap and held powerless under a huge burning glass, is saved by an eclipse of the sun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This sounds a bit fantastic, but that&#8217;s not the problem, because it&#8217;s listed under &#8220;Occult and Fantastic&#8221; conflicts. No, the real problem is that readers often think you&#8217;re supposed to cut this conflict out and paste it down as-is, when, actually, you&#8217;re not supposed to. <em>It&#8217;s only an example.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>An example of what? Basically, of a\u00a0situation featuring a\u00a0self-operating killing machine that our hero escapes on his own, with\u00a0the aid of a minor flaw in its operation.<\/p>\n<p>Far-fetched? Hardly. This plot has been used before, in stories we&#8217;ve all heard of.<\/p>\n<h2>Real Stories Using This Plot<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><em>The Pit and the Pendulum<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n<li><em>Androcles and the Lion,<\/em> 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.<\/li>\n<li>Partial credit for the laser scene in <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/DoQwKe0lggw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Goldfinger<\/a>, though Bond talks his way out instead of doing it right, with a mirror or something.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>Mistake 2: Not Understanding the Masterplot Table<\/h1>\n<blockquote><p>Any A Clause may be used in conjunction with any B Clause and with Any C Clause.<br \/>\n\u2014<em>Plotto, page 17<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>For example, about the first Masterplot you encounter will be:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A1. A person in love,<\/li>\n<li>B1. Engaging in a difficult enterprise when promised a reward for high achievement,<\/li>\n<li>C1. Pays a grim penalty in an unfortunate undertaking.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>But it&#8217;s only for convenience.<\/em> You can just as easily take a B and C clauses from different regions of the table, like this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A1. A person in love,<\/li>\n<li>B59. Engaging in an enterprise and becoming involved with the occult and fantastic,<\/li>\n<li>C8. Achieves a spiritual victory.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Most people don&#8217;t even realize that this is possible! In fact, at least two editions of Plotto (the Tin House Books Kindle edition, and Ashleywilde&#8217;s <em>Plots Unlimited,<\/em>\u00a0format the Masterplot table according to the usual misinterpretation, making it less likely that you&#8217;ll ever figure out that you can use it the way it&#8217;s meant to be used, an an any-to-any manner, like my example above.<\/p>\n<p>My own Norton Creek Press edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto <\/a>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&#8217;s not technically feasible with the printing process I used).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Basically, all you need to know is &#8220;pick any clauses you like from the A, B, and C columns.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h1>Mistake 3. Not Reading the Plotto Instruction Booklet<\/h1>\n<p>Pretty much the moment Plotto hit the presses, Cook realized that most readers couldn&#8217;t\u00a0understand it, so\u00a0he created a seven-lesson instruction course in the form of a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto-instruction-book\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto Instruction Booklet<\/a>.\u00a0<em>You need this instruction booklet!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Original copies of the booklet are\u00a0extremely\u00a0hard to find, though sometimes a old copy of Plotto will include one, perhaps tucked in a pouch on the inside front cover.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve republished the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto-instruction-book\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto Instruction Booklet<\/a> as a stand-alone title (in paperback and Kindle form). Tin House Books includes it at the back of their edition of <em>Plotto<\/em> (too bad\u2014it should be in the front).<\/p>\n<h2>You can use the Plotto Instruction Booklet with:<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Original copies of Plotto, printed by Ellis Publishing company between 1928 and 1941.<\/li>\n<li>The Norton Creek Press edition of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/other-books\/plotto\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plotto<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/1TrbqWH\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Plots Unlimited<\/a>, printed by Ashleywilde. (Plots Unlimited is a bowdlerized version of Plotto.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There you have it. Three things you can do to turn your Plotto-ing around.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>William Wallace Cook&#8217;s plot-suggestion system, Plotto, is woefully misunderstood, even by some of its biggest fans. Let&#8217;s take of three\u00a0of the most basic mistakes that will prevent you from getting the most out of this wonderful\u00a0plotting aid for writers and screenwriters. Mistake 1: Taking Plot Hints Literally At first glance, all plot suggestions in Plotto &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/plotto-avoid-two-huge-mistakes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,5,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-plotto","category-fiction"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes - Norton Creek Press<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nortoncreekpress.com\/wordpress\/plotto-avoid-two-huge-mistakes\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Plotto: Avoid These Three Huge Mistakes - Norton Creek Press\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"William Wallace Cook&#8217;s plot-suggestion system, Plotto, is woefully misunderstood, even by some of its biggest fans. 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