Book of 1,001 Plot Devices

May 16, 2021 6:59 PM

Do you have a preferred book that covers plot devices? Could be pointed at readers or writers, and for writers, I’m more oriented toward fiction, but screenwriting, etc. would work too. Something like a mashup of an encyclopedia of narrative techniques and TV Tropes, covering everything from unreliable narrators to time bombs to episode-in-a-bottle.

This is something I’ve looked for many times without success in bookstores, libraries, and so on. Seems like every book on writing will have something, but none are… encyclopedic. I’ve tried using TV Tropes, but it’s too extensive, often including tropes that aren’t helpful to me as a writer.

I’ve been doing short stories for many years, but having switched (back) to novels, I find myself grasping for the techniques that will lead to strong forward movement in a novel by, say, Ruth Ware, Megan Abbott, and other high-tension writers. I don’t want to cram in mechanisms just for the sake of it, and the authors I think plot well tend not to use more devices than necessary, but I’ve always been weak on both structure and endgame, and I’m looking to improve both.

Thank you!

posted by cupcakeninja to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

Try Secrets of the World’s Best-Selling Writer — Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason books. The appendix includes his “Formulae for Writing a Mystery” and it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to what you want. Good luck!
posted by shirobara at 7:57 PM on May 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Plotto is, I find, an unreadable curiosity, but it might have what you're looking for.
posted by HeroZero at 8:02 PM on May 16, 2021 [4 favorites]

Incidentally, Plotto was an inspiration for Gardner’s plotting methods — he wrote about it, “A writer should have a constructive mind. If he uses any mechanical plot help to do his thinking for him his stories are going to be weak. If he uses a plot device to help get his imagination working, he’s saving himself time and trouble.”
posted by shirobara at 8:25 PM on May 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

I came at this from another angle, I love to invent stories with my 3 year old and was looking for a a little help to come up with narrative elements I could than weave my own stories around.
Through that I found the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index. That is a systematic cataglogue of folktale types with names like this:
ATU 592 The Dance Among Thorns
ATU 311 Rescue by Sister
ATU 531 The Clever Horse

These are more like writing prompts and not narrative techniques, but maybe you can use it, I find the names quite evocative.
posted by SweetLiesOfBokonon at 3:32 AM on May 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Are you looking for a list or catalog? Or more of a description of the overall groupings?

I, too, would be delighted to find the former, but I haven't yet. I can't imagine that many authors would admit that they used such an archetype to write their story, and any catalog created from the outside is dubious for the same reason. *shrug* Still looking, though!

For the latter, in the book "The Seven basic Plots," Christopher Booker boils it down to (yes) seven:

We are all familiar with the teasing notion that there may be `only seven (or six, or five) basic stories in the world'. It is tantalising not least because, even though this suggestion has not infrequently been put forward in print, its authors never seem to carry it further by explaining just what those stories might be. But it is now more than 30 years since I began to realise that there might seriously be some truth in this idea.

While writing a book on a quite different subject, I found my attention focusing on a small number of particular stories. They included a Shakespeare play, Macbeth; Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita; a 1960s French film, Truffaut's Jules et Jim; the Greek myth of Icarus; and the German legend of Faust. On the face of it, these stories might not seem to have much in common. But what haunted me was the way that, at a deeper level, they all seemed to unfold round the same general pattern. Each begins with a hero, or heroes, in some way unfulfilled. The mood at the beginning of the story is one of anticipation, as the hero seems to be standing on the edge of some great adventure or experience. In each case he finds a focus for his ambitions or desires, and for a time seems to enjoy almost dream-like success. Macbeth becomes king; Humbert embarks on his affair with the bewitching Lolita; Jules and Jim, two young men in pre-First World War Paris, meet the girl of their dreams; Icarus discovers that he can fly; Faust is given access by the devil to all sorts of magical experiences. But gradually the mood of the story darkens. The hero experiences an increasing sense of frustration. There is something about the course he has chosen which makes it appear doomed, unable to resolve happily. More and more he runs into difficulty; everything goes wrong; until that original dream has turned into a nightmare. Finally, seemingly inexorably, the story works up to a climax of violent self-destruction. The dream ends in death.

So consistent was the pattern underlying each of these stories that it was possible to track it in a series of five identifiable stages: from the initial mood of anticipation, through a `dream stage' when all seems to be going unbelievably well, to the `frustration stage' when things begin to go mysteriously wrong, to the `nightmare stage' where everything goes horrendously wrong, ending in that final moment of death and destruction.

...And then he goes on to discuss how he traces it -- and the other main story structures -- through hundreds of tales, films, and other works.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:17 AM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Note also, there's TVTropes.com
posted by k3ninho at 10:50 AM on May 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I actually have Plotto and Plots Unlimited. They do use a lot of conventions, like how you want the story to turn, or at least, give you some inspiration if you are stuck in a particular plot point.

There's a more recent version called "The Plot Genie". All three are on Amazon.
posted by kschang at 11:34 AM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

You might like Making Shapely Fiction, it’s very good.
posted by oulipian at 9:01 PM on May 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Fiction Writer's Silent Partner is a really interesting book, kind of old school, lots of lists.
posted by johngoren at 2:07 AM on May 18, 2021 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you, all. There were some books here I hadn’t heard of, and I look forward to reading them! Also, I would never have thought to use the ATU index for this purpose—what a great idea.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:41 PM on May 19, 2021