Plots Unlimited: A Creative Source for Generating a Virtually Limitless Number and Variety of Story Plots and Outlines

This is an update of the long out of print William Wallace Cook mad genius collection of story elements "Plotto", now in the public domain. And an update was indeed in order, unless you consider conflicts "with a person of an inferior race" acceptable. Also available now in computer form (Storybase), Plots Unlimited is proof that the printed book is a competitive medium at least for this type of reference work. The computer program is better for linking scene beats, but the book is easier to browse for a specific category of scene or conflict. This book won't write your script for you, but it take your imagination to places it may not have been lately. I prefer this book to the how-to's because it's full of specifics, useful for most genre work, and doesn't push you into a single formula or structure. If you can't find dozens of situations in here to stimulate your storytelling instinct, then you might as well throw away all the how-to books and come up with something from your own experience or the newspaper. Or re-tell (in your own way) one of the stories you've seen. Believe it or not, you can learn from the experience of others.

Once you understand how to use the book "Plots Unlimited" you will never be short of a basic plot line or subplot again. After reading through it, I sat down in front of the television, watched several modern shows and found the plot line for every one of them in the book. I flipped over to HBO and again found the storylines for each of the current movies in the book. This is not to say that the book will help you write a story, it helps only with the very basic plot line. A lot of would be writers lacking imagination will have a hard time with this book because it does not write the story for you. Several years ago I was deeply involved in the study of magic tricks. At the time I had an old-timer tell me that there were no new tricks, only new ways of presenting the same old tricks. I did not believe that at all because of the wonderful new tricks that David Copperfield and others performed. As I learned the secrets I found that he was indeed right. New methods were extremely rare, almost every "new" trick was actually a masterful change of the surroundings, distractions, story line, etc. This book is the same sort of thing. It will provide you with the various changes and movements through a good story line, but it is up to you to provide the background and breathe life into the plot so that it becomes spellbinding.In the hands of a skilled writer or anyone with a strong imagination this book can provide thousands of combinations of plots and subplots from which to springboard into a wonderful piece of fiction. A recommended book for any serious writer with a decent imagination.

This book is an extraorinary compendium of story ideas that will undoubtedly spark your imagination. But don't get me wrong, Plots Unlimited does not write your story for you. (If this is what you want, you probably shouldn't be writing.) The trick is to use the story suggestions in Plots Unlimited as a starting point for your own imagination. For me, the book works best when I use my imagination to alter the litteral situations in the book (e.g., a 'car' can become a spaceship, a married couple can be teenagers 'going steady', etc.) The story suggestions can be used for writing in any genre, because they each deal with basic human relationships. If you are a writer, Plots Unlimited is definately a good book to have on the shelf...

This is a good book for writers who are stuck on a dead-end plot point and need a nudge in the right direction. A previous reviewer complained about the book's ineffective qualities with science fiction, but it's the writer's job to manipulate the basic conflict situations provided in the book. This book will not give you EXACT PLOTS for your story. But it WILL offer suggestions on directions you could take with your story. On Page 126, the second part of "Conflict Situation - #953" reads, "Jack, wanting peace and quiet, assumes a false identity and finds a distant retreat." The retreat could be a dilapidated apartment in Queens, a rural farm in Montana, or a distant planet in the Andromeda Galaxy. Those creative souls who look at the contents of this book in LITERAL terms will find nothing useful because it's only intended to spark the writer's imagination, NOT provide easy plots for lazy writers. I think this is a wonderful resource, and I recommend it to any aspiring, or professional writer out there who needs a little nudge to get their story moving.