In 1928, author William Wallace Cook catalogued every narrative plot “through a method that bordered on madness,” ending up with 1,462 plots and the how-to manual Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Brainpickings reviews the book, which was reissued last month by Tin House.
“[Plotto] is a reference guide that is at once dense, artful, and hilarious. Crack open the book at any page and you’ll find conflicts you never knew existed, between character A and character B, whose individual quirks manage to shine through. But while the handbook might take a mechanical approach to its subject, Cook recognized in the introduction that what he was providing was still a skeleton of a story, and it was the writer who must provide the art.”
