A few months ago, Tin
House, to great success, released their reprinting of The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto by Bernard DeVoto, originally
published in the 1950’s. The book became a cult classic among cocktail
enthusiasts, but became increasingly rare to find over the decades. In 2010, Tin
House brought new life into a book that would have been lost to obscurity and
time. It seems the publishing company has found another gem from the past: Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots, by the
prolific pulp writer William Wallace Cook. Cook himself banged out countless stories to
the tune of 66,000 words a week back in the height of pulp writing. The man
clearly had a knack for creating plots and in 1928 he published his methods in
a book called Plotto. While Cook
passed away in 1933 in the town in
Marshall, Michigan, I am sure he would have been happy knowing that his
masterpiece how-to story writing book has made it through the decades.
Plotto is a guide
designed for writing that operates on Cook’s theory that: Purpose,
opposed by obstacle, yields conflict. The book is set up into sections: The
Master plot, The Conflict Situations, and Character Combinations. The book is a
little too complex in its set up to fully explain here, but choosing options from each of the three
sections will help the writer to create a full-fledged story—almost like a
choose-your-own-adventure book that instead makes you write what happens when
you flip to page 46 instead of 12.
Tin House is due to release Plotto in November of this year with an introduction by the writer
Paul Collins. This book arrives just in time for all of you out there
participating in NaNoWriMo (National
Novel Writing Month). This book would surely be an asset to marathon novelists
everywhere. To those of you not writing until your brains melt out of your ears
this November— this book is still a unique book to have in your collection. If
you suffer from writer’s block, I can assure that this book will offer a cure.
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