Plotto by William Wallace Cook

Plotto by William Wallace Cook

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.

This Norton Creek Edition is an exact reproduction of Cook's work. To keep the book down to a manageable size (300 pages of very small type) while retaining its powerful features, Cook uses a telegraphic format that takes some getting used to. To get up to speed quickly, get Plotto's companion volume, the Plotto Instruction Booklet. This is the key to avoiding false starts and getting professional-quality results quickly.

What is Plotto? Let's start by what it is not: it's not a random plot generator. There is no randomness in Plotto. Instead, Plotto is a well-indexed catalog of character situations, especially character conflicts. Each conflict has suggestions for both backstory and future developments. Plotto also has multiple indexes. For example, you can enter through the combination of characters in the conflict (such as the male protagonist and the female protagonist), the situation (needing money to get out of a scrape), or starting at the end and working backwards (becoming involved in the weird and occult and coming to a tragic end). Thus, Plotto is equally useful for plots, subplots, and backstory.

Because Plotto was written in the Twenties, its situations can seem old-fashioned and its terminology politically incorrect. These problems are more apparent than real. Cook himself wrote both westerns and early classics of science fiction, so you see how replacing stagecoach with star ship or dance hall girl with male stripper are within the reach of anyone using the Plotto system. In fact, this kind of substitution is an ordinary and expected part of the Plotto system, and is essential to the fruitful use of the Plotto system, and is the key to its flexibility and enduring popularity.

This Norton Creek Press edition of Plotto is an exact replica of the original edition. Visit our Web site at http: //www.nortoncreekpress.com for more classic reprints, including William Wallace Cook's Plotto Instruction Booklet and his autobiographical The Fiction Factory.

William Wallace Cook was a pulp fiction writer dubbed the man who deforested Canada because of his prolific output. He was an early adopter of a number of new technology at the time. He was one of the first writers to use a typewriter and index an huge collection of magazine and newspaper clippings with card files. Cook's love for efficiency and method in writing is reflected in Plotto. Cook's autobiography, The Fiction Factory (written under the pen name John Milton Edwards), was also released by Norton Creek Publishing and covers the first part of his literary career in depth.

Cook, who was born in Michigan in 1878, relocated to Arizona for his health at one time, and the Old West aura he soaked up there helped him become a sought-after Western author. Cook's fascination with technology was undoubtedly the inspiration for his science fiction stories, such as A Round Trip to the Year 2000, which were published before science fiction was a well-established genre. As a result, it should come as no surprise that Cook began writing screenplays for silent films in 1912 with It All Came Out in the Wash. The Plotto plot-suggestion tool is Cook's most well-known work.

Cook died of pneumonia in Kansas in 1935.