The scholarly structuralist texts and professional writer’s manuals featured in the previous cases share an imperative to distill stories into their basic elements. The early 20th century saw a rise not only in analytic texts, but also in manuals, devices, and methods designed to generate text. These writers’ aids helped writers arrange plots, produce narrative tension, and create character webs. Some outlined strategies for generating text through straightforwardly mechanical means, shuffling plot elements to create new permutations. The Plot Genie and Plotto, for example, gave aspiring writers long lists of characters, attributes, settings, conflicts, and resolutions, as well as a device (such as a wheel) that made chance and algorithmic or mechanical selection part of the writing process.
Techniques for combinatorial writing were not new in the early 20th century, but drew on a long tradition of categorizing plot and character types, dating from Aristotle and Theophrastus, and combinatorial devices from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In 1305, Ramon Llull devised combinatorial devices to answer theological questions and generate proofs. You can see these devices in the photograph here (of Plimpton 187, a 15th century manuscript in the RBML). Such diagrams allowed Llull to conceive relationships between concepts (e.g. goodness, greatness, eternity) which could generate theological claims (e.g. “Goodness is as great as eternity”).
When mathematician Martin Gardener encountered the plot-generating algorithms in William Wallace Cook’s Plotto (1928), he compared them to those of Llull’s combinatorial wheels. Yet, while medieval and Renaissance combinatorial devices served the theologian, driven by the fundamental mysteries of the universe, the combinatorial writing devices of the 20th century served the professional writer, driven by ambition and financial need to produce narrative content on a deadline.