Plotto: The Classic Plot Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction. Este artículo no está disponible.Plotto: The Classic Plot Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction

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. Its companion piece, the Plotto Instruction Booklet, is almost unobtainable.

Plotto's value lies as much in what is isn't as in what it is. Plotto isn't a random plot generator, and never gives you something you can cut out and paste down (sometimes it looks like you could, but ... don't). Instead, it deliberately serves up situations or conflicts that seem rather lifeless at first glance, because they are. They still need to be animated by the spark of your own creativity, while putting the process into a more manageable framework.

This Norton Creek Edition is an exact reproduction of Cook’s work. To keep the book down to a manageable size (300 pages of small type) while retaining its powerful features, Cook uses, alas, small type and a telegraphic format that takes some getting used to, so working through the Plotto Instruction Booklet (also available from Norton Creek Press) or at least the examples at the front of the book are essential.

Because Plotto was written in the 1920s, its situations are old-fashioned and its terminology is politically incorrect, but these problems are more apparent than real since you'll be reworking everything anyway. 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 how the book is intended to be used, and is the key to its flexibility and enduring popularity.

William Wallace Cook was a pulp fiction writer whose 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 1878, at one point Cook 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. Cook's 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's most famous work is the Plotto plot-suggestion tool. Cook died in Kansas of pneumonia in 1935.