ABSTRACT: As the market for magazine stories, pulp, and other popular genres exploded in the late nineteenth century, editors clamored for fiction that featured a "strong," original plot—yet as ever more stories flooded booksellers' shelves, their plots blurred into monotony. To address this problem, a slew of plot-focused how-to manuals appeared between the 1890s and World War II, bearing colorful titles like The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (1895), The Universal Plot Catalog (1916), Ten Million Photoplay Plots (1919), and Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction (1928). Featuring a hodgepodge of autobiographical anecdotes, analyses of published stories and photoplays, philosophical musings on creativity, and inventories of common plot arcs, these manuals claimed to offer authors a pathway toward originality. Ironically, though, they often worsened this crisis of literary repetitiveness: Rather than teaching writers to create new plots, the manuals actually encouraged them to recycle formulaic storylines ad infinitum. This article explores the plot manuals' muddled theorizations of originality and unoriginality in relation to a marketplace saturated with stories. I argue that when novelty came to seem impossible in popular fiction, plot manuals offered an alternative: a model of writing, and of reading, that found heightened value in encountering the same plots repeatedly. By theorizing how to reuse plots, the manuals presented readers and writers with a kind of textual engagement tailor-made for the turn-of-the-century literary sphere, transforming repetitiveness from a detriment into an asset.
Micah S. Siegel (Thu,) studied this question.