You know the old chestnut, some guy comes up to a successful novelist and says “I’ve got a great idea for a plot, I’ll tell it to you, you write it and we split the proceeds”
The point of this is to show the obliviousness of the idea giver about just how much work is actually involved in writing, but I would really enjoy just reading a collection of decent plot summaries people came up with but then couldn’t/wouldn’t do the work to turn it into a publishable product. Anybody know a website, (or maybe even an entire book) that just focuses on collecting interesting rough story drafts.
For example I enjoy reading “Twilight Zone” summaries on Wikipedia, something that length but for books that never made it to publication.
In the 1920s, dime store novelist William Wallace Cook painstakingly diagramed and cataloged his personal writing method―“Purpose, opposed by Obstacle, yields Conflict”―for the instruction and illumination of his fellow authors. His effort resulted in an astonishing 1,462 plot scenarios, and Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots was born. A how-to manual for plot, hailed by the Boston Globe as “First aid to troubled riters,” Plotto influenced Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason books, and a young Alfred Hitchcock.
At first glance, Plotto operates with a machinelike logic, but from its endless amalgamations writers will find inspiration for narratives with limitless possibility. Open the book to any page to find plots you may never have known existed–from morose cannibals to gun-wielding preachers to phantom automobiles.
Equal parts reference guide and historical oddity, Plotto is sure to amaze and delight writers for another hundred years.
This reminds me of the plot of ‘The Plot’, a novel about a failed writer teaching an English class who has a student who claims he has a plot idea for a sure-fire best seller. When the student suddenly dies, the teacher gets ahold of the student’s plot notes, writes a novel using the plot idea, and becomes rich and famous. But of course plot twists and hijinks occur.
Anyway, like you say, the most ridiculous part of the plot of ‘The Plot’ was the idea that there could be a plot idea so good it was a sure-fire success. That’s just silly. The devil is in the details, and no plot idea is so good it’s a guaranteed success, no matter who writes a novel from it. The plot idea, meaning the plot that the teacher stole, not the actual plot of ‘The Plot’, was actually kind of dumb and was definitely no sure thing. The actual plot of ‘The Plot’ was not much better, with a plot twist that was far-fetched at best.
And now the word ‘plot’ has lost all meaning for me.
Finally found the book I had in mind. It’s not exactly what you (OP) were looking for, but it is a collection of very short plot summaries (etc), albeit done largely for humorous effect. How To Become Ridiculously Well Read In One Evening by E O Parrott.
…In it are contained some 150 succinct and entertaining encapsulations of the best-known books in the English language…
Some are prose, many are rhyme. As a taster, the summary of The Great Gatsby (which has been on my mind ever since you started this thread) concludes thus:
To shield the guilty loved one’s name,
Impulsive Gatsby takes the blame.
(And that’s how idealistic fools
End up face down in swimming pools.)
My mother had a book called Thesaurus of Book Digests by Hiram Haydn, which summarized the plots of hundreds of classic novels. It looks like it’s still available, with updated versions that cover newer novels (the original was from 1949).
I read through it a lot and have her copy somewhere.
As a kid, I read my family’s multi-volume set of Masterplots: Digests of World Literature from start to finish. Each summary was, however, about 1-1/2 to 2 pages longs, so they were not really that short.
Parrott wrote a whole series of such books including How To Become Absurdly Well-informed About The Famous and Infamous: A Collection of Brief Biographies, How to Be Well-versed in Poetry, and How to Be Tremendously Tuned in to Opera, as with other humor books. He was born in 1924 and is still living.