Thursday Things: Plot Twist Edition

10 April 2025. Vol 7 No 15. By Dan McGirt. #296

Apr 10, 2025

Thursday Things is here! This week we have plot twists online and transplants in the UK! Feels like heaven.

If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the header or at the end of the post to let me know.

Dire wolf this, dire wolf that. What about us hardworking regular wolves who managed to survive for the past 10,000 years without some fancy biotech do-over? Photo by Pierre Vorpuni on Unsplash

Plotto, you just gotto!

Before there was AI, there was Plotto. I stumbled across the book Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots by William Cook eight or nine years ago and bought it, mostly as a curiosity.

Who was William Cook? From publisher Tin House’s website:

William Wallace Cook was born in Marshall, Michigan, in 1867. He was the author of a memoir, The Fiction Factory1, as well as dozens of Westerns and science-fiction novels, many of which were adapted into films. He was nicknamed “the man who deforested Canada” for the volume of stories he fed into the pulp-magazine mill. He spent five years composing Plotto before finally publishing it in 1928. Cook died in his hometown of Marshall in 1933.

I have a special fondness for popular fiction of the late 19th to early 20th century. Dime novels, pulp magazine fiction, mass market paperback originals — I’m there all day, and into the night. This is the era of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Talbot Mundy, H. Rider Haggard, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Lester Dent, Walter Gibson, and many, many more writers whose names are obscure today. I love finding the work of some prolific-but-now-largely-forgotten author of pulpy adventure thrills.

Sure, this was also the time of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Sinclair, Steinbeck, etc. And don’t get me wrong, they’re all fine writers and I enjoy them too. But their work for the most past has a distinct lack of giant snakes, dinosaur islands, lost cities, forbidden temples, mysterious cults, cursed idols, sloe-eyed dancing girls, sword fights, scheming viziers, death traps, quicksand, shark pools, and other elements that make for a good yarn.

Yes, yes, you’ve exposed the horrific practices of the meatpacking industry. That’s awesome. Meanwhile, John Carter saved Mars from the Guild of Assassins. Which would I rather read?

But I digress. Cook is one of those prolific-yet-forgotten writers of popular entertainment that I love learning about. And even better — he’s one of those who shared his “secret” of success — Plotto!

More from Tin House:

A classic how-to manual, William Wallace Cook’s Plotto is one writer’s personal method, painstakingly diagrammed for the benefit of others. The theory itself may be simple—“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”—but Cook takes his “Plottoist” through hundreds of situations and scenarios, guiding the reader’s hand through a dizzying array of “purposes” and “obstacles.”
The method is broken down into three stages:
1. The Master Plot
2. The Conflict Situation
3. Character Combinations

Plotto is hard to explain without seeing it. It’s hard to explain even with seeing it. The Amazon listing for Plotto tries:

In the 1920s, dime store novelist William Wallace Cook painstakingly diagramed and cataloged his personal writing method―“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”―for the instruction and illumination of his fellow authors. His effort resulted in an astonishing 1,462 plot scenarios … how-to manual for plot, hailed by the Boston Globe as “First aid to troubled writers,” Plotto influenced Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason books, and a young Alfred Hitchcock.

Which is not nothing. Hitchcock and Gardner both knew a thing or two about putting together a compelling story. If Plotto helped them learn how, it’s worth a look.

As the book pitch concludes: “Open the book to any page to find plots you may never have known existed--from morose cannibals to gun-wielding preachers to phantom automobiles. … Equal parts reference guide and historical oddity, Plotto is sure to amaze and delight writers for another hundred years.”

I will admit that I have not yet attempted to write a story using the Plotto method. Again, I bought the book more out of enthusiastic appreciation for the fact that it exists than as an immediate writing aid.2 I’ve browsed it a few times, but the book has largely languished on one of my many bookshelves.

That however, may soon change. The good people at Tin House will have to forgive me, but Cook’s Plotto is in the public domain, which means others are free to produce their own variations of it — including the item that triggered my interest this week: Plotto online!

What happens when you combine coding nerds with book nerds? You get this repository on Github:

PLOTTO: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction

Someone turned the entire text of Plotto, with all its many story prompts, into a hyperlinked database.

You can go there and read the explanation of how Plotto works and then employ the method for yourself by clicking links to compile your plot elements instead of flipping back and forth in a 480 page book. Not that that doesn’t have its charms.

So if you’re at all curious, visit the site and play with it a bit. Plotto, like the Matrix, is something you can only understand once you see it for yourself.

For my part, I plan to use Plotto to write a story at some point this year. I’ll let you know how that turns out!

Plotto! Image: Tin House

Womb with a view

This is one of those “Welcome to the Future” stories, where I’m amazed that medical science has reached the point this is possible:

First baby in UK born from a womb transplant

When Amy Isabel Davidson was born six weeks ago surgeons in her delivery room broke down in tears of joy. The little girl made history by becoming the first child in Britain to be born from a womb transplant — in an organ donated by her aunt to her mother.
Amy was delivered by NHS caesarean section on February 27 at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital in London. Her mother, Grace Davidson, 36, described the feeling of “shock” at holding her daughter, after getting a womb transplant from her older sister in 2023 — whom Amy is named after.

“It was just hard to believe she was real,” Davidson said. “We have been given the greatest gift we could ever have asked for.”

This is the first I’ve ever heard of a womb transplant. And yet it seems I’m about ten years or so behind on the news:

Since the first womb transplant in Sweden in 2014, 50 babies have been born worldwide as a result of the highly complex procedure, mainly in the United States and the Middle East. A transplanted womb should last five years, which is enough for two pregnancies, and women have to take immunosuppressants during pregnancy to ensure their body does not reject the womb.

Who knew?

Obviously, not me. Congratulations all around to the doctors, new mum, and to little Amy Isabel Davidson, who seems to have done her part in all this with flying colors.

This week’s edition is brought to you by Dan’s Advice: Take control of your digital life.