About the Author

William Wallace Cook (1867-1933) was a prolific author and an early enthusiast of systematic writing. His most famous work is Plotto: The Classic Plot Suggestion Tool for Writers of Creative Fiction, and its essential companion volume, the Plotto Instruction Booklet and his autobiographical work, The Fiction Factory, /i> describing his ups and downs as a prolific freelance writer for pulp magazines more than a century ago, is not to be missed. (All three are available from Norton Creek Press.)

Cook had an orderly mind and an unruly imagination, and worked hard to organize what could be organized, so his rampant creativity could run at full speed, producing fiction in every genre, including screenplays and early works of science fiction. He was an early adopter of the typewriter and wore many of them out. He maintained an ever-growing library of newspaper and magazine clippings and adopted the then-new practice of indexing them through a file card system.

For more information about Cook's writing life, see his autobiographical The Fiction Factory (1912), written under the alias John Milton Edwards. He published Plotto and its instruction booklet in 1928, and died in 1933.