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Spinning a story
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“You will be surprised to learn how some very knowing people have misunderstood Plotto. On glancing at it, some of the intelligentia have jumped at the false conclusion, that Plotto is a dictionary of situations, a mechanism that yields a cut and dried plot by the mere use of a thumb index. Plotto, to the contrary, merely suggests the situations for the plot, explains what is to be done through Purpose and Obstacle and even offers suggestions as to the way in which it should be done.”
— William Wallace Cook, the instruction booklet for Plotto
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 Unlike Polti’s 36, which is a theoretical classification, Plotto is practical, a how-to-do-it manual. Like Roget’s Thesaurus, which began as one writer’s personal notebook, Plotto is one writer’s personal method, written and published for the benefit of others.
William Wallace Cook was a writer of early science fiction and westerns. For decades he cranked out dime novels for Street & Smith, at the dizzying rate of 66,000 words a week. (He tells his own story in The Fiction Factory, under the pen name John Milton Edwards.)
Cook’s dramatic theory is simple: “Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict.” Plotto lists hundreds of Conflict Situations: various Purposes blocked or sidetracked by various Obstacles. And the Plottoist (as Cook calls his readers) can create a plot according to three methods.
1. The Master Plot: This four-page chart is where a simple three line plot can be generated, something like this:
- A person with a certain characteristic (15 options)
- Gets into a situation (62 options)
- And this is how it turns out (15 options)
2. The Conflict Situations: Each of the Master Plot B options has one or more lists of specific Conflict Situations, distributed among 20 Conflict Groups:
- Love’s Beginnings
- Love’s Misadventures
- The Marriage Proposal
- Love’s Rejection
- Marriage
- Misfortune
- Mistaken Judgement
- Helpfulness
- Deliverance
- Idealism
- Obligation
- Necessity
- Chance
- Personal Limitations
- Simulation
- Craftiness
- Transgression
- Revenge
- Mystery
- Revelation
The Conflict Situations are the heart of the book. Each is a simple two or three line sketch, of someone doing something and something going wrong. They are numbered from 1 to 1462, and many are subdivided, pushing the total to well over 2,000. Each Conflict Situation is cross-referenced above and below, with suggestions for how the situation started and where it will go. The Plottoist can use these suggestions or ignore them and find his own lead-ins and outcomes. He is encouraged not to take the Conflict Situations as they are presented, but to change the characters and settings, putting his own spin on the situation, personalizing it.
3. Character Combinations: A special index lists the male or female protagonist with various male or female supporting characters: man and woman, man and boss, woman and mother — over 150 combinations, each cross-referenced to a number of Conflict Situations, offering a wealth of suggestions.
 Plotto was first published in 1928. A seven chapter instruction booklet appeared in 1934. It was republished as Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, in 1941.
In 1994, there appeared Plots Unlimited, by two individuals whom I will not name. PU, as I call it, is nothing more than a freshly typed copy of Plotto, with some of the language modernized and a few typos corrected. Cook is dismissed with one line at the bottom of the second page, and the “authors” pass off the book (and computer software) as their own creation. I mention it here only to warn my readers to avoid it.
“For more than 40 years, the author of Plotto has been writing and selling stories, and out of this long experience he earnestly believes that here in Plotto is Truth and a Method of Originality as firmly founded as Human Nature itself,” the instruction book to Plotto reads. “The author of Plotto has given five years to the preparation of this work. He knows it is imperfect and that it would still be imperfect if he had spent a whole lifetime in its preparation. But he has proved that it is practical.”
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