Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I picked this book up at my local library without knowing anything about it. I didn't spend much time with it while I was browsing and when I got it home I thumbed through it for about 15 minutes trying to get a better sense of the process of constructing plots ... without reading the instructions.

I was baffled.

Then I dialed up Amazon and read some of the reviews. Most of them are unflattering: the book is ripped off from William Wallace Cook's "Plotto"; it's too hard; good if all you want to write is cliched fiction; good if all you want to write are short stories; the plots are overdone and dated.

I'm a man who likes to dig into something and see for myself. These reviews weren't good enough for me. So I logged off the Internet, grabbed the book and began plotting.

My reaction to the book, as a tool, is considerably different than what many others here said.

* Who cares if the book rips off "Plotto"? That classic book is long out of print. Yeah, as a writer I have some issues with the authors of "Plots Unlimited" not giving more credit to Cook. And, at the same time, the public domain is a fiction writer's goldmine. I can live with this.

* The instructions can be a little daunting. I found myself going back and forth repeatedly to the front of the book to make sure I understood what my next step was. On the one hand, I felt it slowed the creative process to a degree.

On the other hand, I think that's good ... at least for me. I'm often ablaze with ideas. Some are good. Most are terrible: okay for a scene or three, but not really enough to develop a plot. This book forced me to slow down and think about how to structure my ideas in ways that make sense for the story. And because each entry in the book leads to multiple elements, both as lead ins and lead outs, I could think about numerous directions instead of just the first thing that popped into my head.

If anything, this process made me more aware of more possibilities by turning on some deep brain thinking about the choices.

* I don't buy the cliche criticism. Most good fiction is filled with cliches and really great writers use them in everything they write. They just do it better.

* I don't buy the short story criticism, either. Novels are made of scenes and subplots that propel the master plot forward incrementally. Use this book to pick your master plot. Then layer your subplots into it. Heck, use the book to create your subplots, too, if you want.

* I, too, found the situations overdone and dated. In the end, though, it didn't matter because imagination took over. When I arrived at a situation that was too cheesy (some are flat-out laughable) or hackneyed, because I was already using critical thinking, I could easily make substitutions for whatever "Plots Unlimited" threw at me.

The thing to remember is that this book is a tool with a specific purpose. You wouldn't use a hammer when a saw is the right choice. With that in mind, this book won't write your stories for you. It won't help you with emotion and setting and character development. It's a plotting tool. Period.

In the end, I don't care about the criticisms. For me, this book is a keeper.

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.

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.

Okay. So the book is chuck full of ideas, but you need a masters degree in reading technical manuals in order to implement them. As soon as I began to read the "instructions", my muse packed her bags and headed to parts unknown.

Save your money, and buy other, more straight-forward plot point books.

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.

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...

Plots Unlimited owes nothing to the TV movies of the 70's and 80's. Its real inspiration was "a new method of plot suggestion" first published in 1928! It was titled "Plotto". The author, William Wallace Cook, was a prolific author of pulp science fiction - he cranked out an amazing 66,000 words per week - and I suspect he began writing "Plotto" for his own use. All that Sawyer and Weingarten did was modernize some of the language; the Masterplots, Conflict Situations, even the cross references: they copied it all from Cook.

This book gives great, flexible plot ideas that can be used by a variety of writers. This book will be very useful for me when I am in a rut, or don't know where to go with my characters. It doesn't create a story, but gives ideas of the where you can lead your story. I was skeptical after reading other reviews, but if you have any talent, or imagination, this book will only enrich your writing goals. Definently a book to have on your shelf!

I met the author of this book/software at a writer's conference in 1999. He gave it a lot of hype, saying that this can cure writer's block. So, I bought both and took them home. I installed the program, tried out the tutorial, and tried to use it to cure my own writer's block. I was sorely disappointed by the lack of variety and an 80's feel of the plot situations. I wound up returning the software because 1) It wasn't user friendly, 2) It didn't meet my needs, and 3) It was overpriced for what it had to offer.The book is basically lists all the plot options available in the software. Don't get me wrong, the concept of the book/software is great. Sawyer just needs to develop it more and modernize his plot segments. This book, I feel, is good for subplots or short stories. All you have to do is take the basic premise of each segment and tweak it until it suits your needs.

"Plots Limited" would be a more apt title. There is not that great a variety, unless you want to limit yourself to the cliched, the hackneyed, the predictable, or the downright silly.

I've been through this book several times and have yet to find it useful. What I find instead is that I can actually name the TV movies, miniseries, and bad TV shows where these plots have already appeared. (And time has not made them any more palatable.) This makes it more of a trivia game than a writer's reference.

However, if you're looking for a nostalgic journey through The Worst of 1970s and '80s Television, this book is for you.