If you’ve been tuning into State of Wonder this fall, you know that we’ve been full bore on a flash fiction contest being run by the Portland/Brooklyn publisher Tin House. It’s called Plotto, after a weird gem of a book from 1928. “Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots” collects 1,462 plots in an encyclopedic list — sorted by categories like "Themes," "Master Plots" and "Conflicts" — to help struggling writers.
“Plotto” was written by the pulp author William Wallace Cook, who was so prolific he became known as "the man who deforested Canada."
To celebrate its reissue of "Plotto" in paperback, Tin House posted a plot prompt a week for five weeks and gave writers six days to come up with stories inspired by each. They received a whopping 932 entries, and local author Paul Collins chose the grand-prize winner from the five weekly winners.
State of Wonder then recorded the weekly winners reading their stories and remixed them with music, as well as called up the grand prize winner to spill the beans, for your aural pleasure.
Week 1 — GRAND PRIZE WINNER
Winner: "Hey, Neighbor" by John Lawton
Prompt: {Male protagonist A}, proceeding about his business and caught in a crowd, is confronted suddenly by a strange person, {female protagonist BX}, who thrusts a mysterious object, {X}, into his hand and, without a word vanishes.
Beginning: The posts on the website Hey Neighbor fell into three buckets: Prayer Group, Lost Dog, and Suspicious Individual(s). Miller hated Hey Neighbor.
His wife Jennifer read the post “Saturday Picnic” out loud. “This sounds fun.”
“Sounds like work.” It was probably a search picnic for the Crandalls’s beagle Dixon.
“We’re going,” she said.
“I miss Louisville.”
“You hated Louisville. You missed Denton, once we got to Louisville?”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll make my potato salad.”
Week 2
Winner: "Rust" by Annesha Sengupta
Prompt: {Female protagonist B} has taken up her quarters in a vacant house.
Beginning: The walls sit warm around her like a hot blister of skin. There’s a splinter in her finger and she holds tight to the pain. Sonali has always believed that women live out the opposite of their names. What burst of cruelty caused her to blurt out, on that blood-soaked hospital bed, the name Ananda for her daughter? Ananda. Happy...
Week 3
Winner: "Thanksgiving" by Carolyn Oliver
Prompt: {Male protagonist A}, a novelist, meets personally in real life a fictitious character from one of his stories.
Beginning: Sarah Park appreciated the new dentist’s sensitivity. Unlike Dr. Stewart, who, while Sarah’s mouth was full of metal instruments or toothpaste, loved to ask her the kinds of questions whose answers her publicist sent out with advance copies of her books (“Where did you get the idea for this one?” “How long did it take to write?” “What are you working on now?”), Dr. Williams betrayed not the slightest interest in Sarah’s novels...
Week 4
Winner: "Laws" by Zana Previti (who won in 2012 for "Svarga Divjasana")
Prompt: {Male protagonist A} believes himself guilty of a crime which he cannot remember having committed.
Beginning: Sister Clotilde held the boy by his shoulders and marched him into the Headmistress’s office.
“Hey!” protested the secretary.
Sr. Clotilde turned, glared, and slammed the door.
“Sister?” Sr. Frances asked.
“Tell her,” Sr. Clotilde instructed the boy, “exactly what you said.”
The child—Max Patrick, nine, and clearly wearing the school uniform of an older, larger brother—sighed. “I told Billy. I think, I maybe killed someone...”
Week 5
Winner: "Saint Burma" by Nikki HoSang
Prompt: {Female protagonist B}, for many years mysteriously absent from her home, seeks a happy renewal of old ties by returning suddenly and unheralded to her native place.
Beginning: Jo was fluffing the vermiculite bedding around the snake eggs when Mary, the kid who cleaned cages and answered the phone, stuck her head in the door.
“I know you’re getting ready to put the eggs in the incubator,” she whispered, “but there’s a guy on the phone? He says he has your snake?”
“Did he say what kind?”
“He said it’s a Burmese python.”
It was her python. Just bigger, older, slower...
Courtesy of Nikki Ho Sang
/Plotto Week 5 winner Nikki Ho Sang
Photo by Benjamin Oliver
/Plotto Week 3 winner Carolyn Oliver
Courtesy of Annesha Sungupta
/Plotto Week 2 winner Annesha Sungupta
Courtesy of Tin House
/Compiling 1,462 plots, "Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots" is a choose-your-own-adventure of encyclopedic proportions for struggling writers.
Courtesy of Zana Previti
/Plotto Week 4 winner Zana Previti
Courtesy of John Lawton
/Plotto grand-prize winner John Lawton
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