William Wallace Cook was a master pulp-smith and dime- and nickel-novel writer. He began his full-time professional career in 1889 and was still going strong in 1911 when he penned, under the pseudonym of ‘John Milton Edwards,’ a book summing up his career thus far and what he’d learned in the writing trade.
You can find the book at http://www.archive.org in several formats, including the cleaned-up, formatted html version which you’ll find serialized here on this blog.
I found it great fun, and breezy reading, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the writing game in that period, when Americans read fiction by the bucketful, before feature movies came along, before radio, before television, before videogames.
Though much has changed, some remains: aspiring talesmen might find instructive Cook’s dealings with his editors, and his general business-like approach to his trade. To Cook, a writer was no more nor less than a cobbler or widget-maker, cranking out goods for a consuming public through a collection of middlemen whose pleasure he must always serve.
‘That Plotto Guy’
Today Cook is probably best known for The Fiction Factory and another book on the craft he wrote in 1928, apparently still in the game almost 40 years since he went from a part-time writer to a full-time one.
Plotto was his catchy name for a system of coming up with plots. I’ve never read it; copies are hard to find, but descriptions are out there on the web. Apparently the book consists of long lists of potential elements of a tale, and if you want to come up with a new story, you just go from one category to the next, picking one out of the each list as you go.
For a very simplified example of how I think the method proceeds, say you pick out Revenge as your basis for a story. Then:
A
Man
or
Woman
Suffers
Pain
or
Humiliation
or
Loss
At the hands of a
Rival
or
Enemy
or
Faithless friend
or
Stranger
or
Competitor
In the realm of
Love
or
Business
or
Sport
or
War
or
Finance
And struggles to gain
What he has lost
or
Further advantage
or
Success
or
Victory
And ultimately
Prevails
or
Suffers Defeat
Many have looked upon such lists as mere formula, but I think it would be better to consider it as the expression of the mental process by which a veteran talesman goes about his business in crafting a new tale. The novice or amateur never conceives of this process in so detailed a manner; to the novice, it’s inconceivable that so many paths are open to him; if he were aware of it, he would find his muse paralyzed at having to choose from so many. The old pro, on the other hand, knows that his survival in the game – his viability in coming up with some sort of freshness in yet another tale – depends entirely on the infinitude of the choices he might take.
Old Hands at Work and Play
Cook at one point in the Fiction Factory discusses the plight of the old-timer, callously tossed aside in favor of new blood, at the hands of editors fresh out of college, where they did no more than edit the college sports paper. He insists that the old hands can still crank out a page-turner or two, but I suspect that if the old timer has one weakness, it springs from the very knowledge that try as he might, all his tales, and all tales in all, fall into a few categories, and only the outer dress distinguishes them. The new writer, on the other hand, is sure that his tale is new and fresh and nothing like it has ever been told before in all the lives of men.
The old pro cranks out another sausage, and he knows it’s just another one; the novice burns with delight to have made something new under the sun.
It is this passion that can make up for the novice’s crudeness of approach, and make his work seem stronger and fresher than the old hand’s. The novice writer believes it is a new thing, and he believes it so strongly that we, his readers, can fool ourselves into believing it too.
And so, for the next few weeks, I give you William Wallace Cook and his Fiction Factory.
(Composed on keyboard Saturday, March 28, 2009)
