Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots
William Wallace Cook (1867-1933)—a prolific author whose voluminous output earned him the nickname “the man who deforested Canada” and who titled his memoir The Fiction Factory; Being the Experience of a Writer Who, for Twenty-Two Years, Has Kept a Story-Mill Grinding Successfully—spent five years composing Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, a book he described as the “greatest single aid in plotting ever offered writers.” Founded on the elegant theory that “Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict,” Plotto presents the reader with a complex network of potential characters, plots, and subplots that has been compared to both algebra and “some utterly mad thesaurus.” Example plot points follow:
- A, a ventriloquist, captured by savages and threatened with death, makes an animal talk—and is given his freedom and loaded with honors
- A has a theory that the perfume of flowers may be blended into musical conceptions
- A is so worried about a certain secret enterprise that, in his absent-minded moments, he pencils, on anything that happens to be convenient, diagrams that offer a clue to the enterprise
- A, a simple mountaineer, comes to a large city in pursuit of an enemy…. in the city, A is so overawed and impressed by his unfamiliar environment that his enmity fades away
The possibilities are intriguing, but is Plotto truly capable of generating a functional plot? Let’s try it out. Opening the book at random, we find plot point 1341, which looks like this:
(1027) (1277a ch A-3 to A-4)
A murders a stranger, A-4, in a lonely wood where the soil is of a peculiar color, unlike any other soil for miles around. A sulks back home with the mud on his shoes. (467) (1302)
The parenthetical numbers that preface the plot point indicate potential “lead-in” plot points that could happen before plot point 1341; the parenthetical numbers that follow indicate possible “follow-up” plot points that could occur after plot point 1341. Characters are designated with A, sometimes followed by a number. Let’s see what happens next by choosing “follow-up” plot point 1302:
(1291c) (1340) (1341)
A seeks to forget a transgression, but a certain object continually reminds him of it. (1344) (1355) (1360) (1365) (1366)
Could the object that haunts A be a boot permanently stained by the peculiar soil of the forest where the murder occurred? Moving forward again to plot point 1355 we find:
(599A; 1330) (830 tr A & A-2; 807) (1337; 820)
A is caught in a snare of superstitious delusion, haunted all his days by an act which he committed in an effort to help a friend, A-2. (732) (1302)
A shocking revelation! A murdered A-4 in order to help friend A-2. Let’s return to the first plot point:
(1027) (1277a ch A-3 to A-4)
A murders a stranger, A-4, in a lonely wood where the soil is of a peculiar color, unlike any other soil for miles around. A sulks back home with the mud on his shoes. (467) (1302)
Perhaps going back in time using a “lead-in” plot point will reveal A’s motivations more fully. Let’s try plot point 1027:
(770a) (1023)
A, hard-pressed for money, is beguiled by the devil into an unwise proceeding. (637) (1341) (1354a) (1371)
At last the plot discloses itself: A needs money to help friend A-2 and—coaxed by the devil—murders wealthy A-4 to acquire the needed funds, only to be “caught in a snare of superstitious delusion”, haunted by a boot permanently stained with the peculiar soil of the “lonely wood” in which the murder occurred.
Not bad! It is possible to imagine an actual short story or novella using this plot. Indeed, esteemed creators of fiction have employed Plotto: Alfred Hitchcock owned a copy, and Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, remarked, “I used Plotto to find out what a plot was and how to build it…. I secured data from it which has been worth a great deal to me”. Cook’s own ability as a plotter is evident from his novels A Round Trip to the Year 2000; or, A Flight through Time and Adrift in the Unknown; or, Queer Adventures in a Queer Realm.
“A writer,” Cook opined, “is neither better nor worse than any other man who happens to be in trade. He is a manufacturer.”
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