by Kim Pederson…….

Everyone looks for guidance. Some things, many things, in fact an innumerable number of things are too hard for us to figure out on our own. We are all “dummies” in one way or another and, given how much there is to know, that’s not a surprise nor a slur. We can’t know it all, even though some people like to give that impression (no names will or need be mentioned here). Fortunately, there always seems to be someone willing to help fill the knowledge gap…some for free, others for a price. Indeed, the how-to industry, if you believe Wikipedia, has “existed in some form since people have spoken to each other.” First, instructions were given through the passing down of oral traditions. Then, when writing reared its cursive head, these traditions were written down and, voila, the how-to manual was born.

Writers are no exception, especially those just dipping their toes into fictive waters. How do you write a novel? It’s a simple question. Doesn’t it deserve a simple answer? Well, thanks to William Wallace Cook, we have one: “purpose, expressed or implied, opposing obstacle, expressed or implied, yields conflict.” There you have it. Cook tells us to take the purpose part of that formula and choose one of three general goals of endeavor:

1. To achieve happiness in love and courtship
2. To achieve happiness in married life
3. To achieve happiness (success) in enterprise

Once you’ve done that, create an obstacle to that purpose and the conflict will come, and conflict, as we all know, lies at the heart of all dramatic art. But let’s back up a step.

Who is William Wallace Cook? Cook, born in 1867 (which may explain why the goals of endeavor seem a little hoary), was known in the “pulp fiction community” as “the man who deforested Canada.” In 1910, for example, he wrote fifty-four novels. He could, if pressed, write a book in twenty-four hours and often did so. Over his lifetime, he wrote hundreds of novels using various pseudonyms, each one 40,000 words, each one 16 chapters of five single-space pages. It’s no wonder he titled his memoir The Fiction Factory.

But besides all those works, he wrote one other. Indeed it may be the only one still in print. The book is called Plotto, perhaps the mother of all how-to fiction-writing manuals. The real formula Cook offers is not the one above but this one: A Clause (establishes protagonist) + B Clause (originates and continues the action + C Clause (continues and resolves the action) = short story, novelette, or novel. He then goes on, in a very diagrammatic manner, to offer fledgling authors fifteen A Clauses, sixty-two B Clauses, and fifteen C Clauses and a staggering 1,462 conflict situations. “All” one needs to do, he instructs, is scrutinize the situations and combine them “until you have the bones of your novel.”

And then perhaps straying from the fiction world for a bit, he mentions that every life has a supreme purpose (“to live!”) and a supreme obstacle (“death”). Cook’s help, under the guise of simplicity, quickly gets overwhelming. I may abandon it in favor of the infinite monkey theorem, which tells us that “given an infinite length of time, a chimpanzee punching typewriter keys at random would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times.” There you go. Why do it yourself when you can get someone else to do the work? Now, where can I find a chimpanzee…or a typewriter for that matter. A little help? Anyone? Anyone?

* Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens. Public Domain.

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Visit Kim Pederson’s blog RatBlurt: Mostly Random Short-Attention-Span Musings.