William Wallace Cook was a highly prolific American journalist and author of popular fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Writing under his own name as well as various pseudonyms, most notably John Milton Edwards, Cook was a versatile contributor to the literary marketplace of his era. His extensive bibliography spans a wide array of genres, including westerns, adventure stories, dime novels, serialized fiction, and works for both stage and screen. Despite his diverse output, he is particularly remembered today for his early contributions to science fiction.
Cook's career was characterized by an industrious, almost mechanical approach to writing, which he famously chronicled in his 1912 book, The Fiction Factory: Being the Experience of a Writer Who, for Twenty-Two Years, has Kept a Story-Mill Grinding Successfully. Published under his John Milton Edwards pen name, the work offered a candid, behind-the-scenes look at the life of a commercial writer churning out mass-market fiction.
In addition to his narrative fiction, Cook made a lasting contribution to the craft of writing with the creation of Plotto: A New Method of Plot Suggestion for Writers of Creative Fiction. Released in the 1920s and later supplemented by a seven-part instruction guide in 1934, this systematic manual offered a complex, algebraic-like framework for generating and structuring narrative plots. Cook's innovative system remains a landmark curiosity and tool in the history of creative writing pedagogy.
