about

THE is a product of its age, so it feels natural by way of acknowledgements to provide some context about how THE came to be. The story begins circa 1965 (several years before I was born) when my father, Thomas Sawyer, happened upon a curious book while he was browsing the shelves of the Strand used bookstore in New York City. Plotto, the Master Book of all Plots, by the prolific Canadian mystery writer, William Wallace Cook, was published in 1928. Plotto was a herculean attempt to create an interlinked web of dramatic situations that could be combined into various classic types of plots - Cook referred to them as Master Plots. 

Plotto languished un-used on my father’s bookshelf yet made its way with him to Malibu, California. It gathered dust for several more years while Tom established himself as a successful television screenwriter. Circa 1982, he was one of the first professional writers to use a personal computer to draft screenplays. I still remember the expert he hired to teach him how to use his new IBM machine. It is not surprising that I should remember - this guy came to the house several hours each day for about 2 weeks. 

As an early adopter of the personal computer, my dad also had a sense of its capabilities. And then one fateful day circa 1985 my dad pulled Plotto down from his shelf, brushed off the dust, and saw it through new eyes - Plotto is a database that could be computerized. Our next door neighbors (literally, next door) at this time happened to include Dr. Kenneth Colby and his family. Dr. Colby was a pioneer in the fields of psychology and computer science and he is perhaps most famous for creating PARRY, a computer model of a paranoid individual. My dad had several discussions with Dr. Colby about turning Plotto into a software program.

 
While continuing his career as a successful television writer and showrunner, and encouraged by his conversations with Dr. Colby, my dad created a company, hired a programmer, and circa 1990, Plots Unlimited was published as DOS-based software for writers. It shipped on six floppy disks and sold at a retail price of $399. Plots Unlimited maintained the same structure as Plotto but my father had hired an out-of-work screenwriter to update the original 1,462 dramatic situations of Plotto to remove the most offensive racial and gender stereotypes. (Reflecting its time and place, Plotto is densely packed with references to the cultural stereotypes of 1920s North America.) Eventually a Mac version of Plots Unlimited was released, as well as a print version. 

By 1999 it was clear that the DOS-based Plots Unlimited needed an upgrade. Having recently graduated from NYU’s School of Law and not eager to pursue a career as a lawyer, and with “dot com” mania in full swing, I took some preliminary steps toward producing an online version of Plots Unlimited. During this process I gained a sense of how the structure and substance of Plots Unlimited could be radically simplified. I began to play with the process of rewriting the dramatic situations of Plots Unlimited and discovered that by stripping away references to culture specific conventions about gender, race and religion, the “dramatic” situations could become primitive universal narrative situations. 

By September 2001 I was living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and, growing increasingly excited to embark on the project of transforming Plots Unlimited, I booked a flight from JFK to LAX for September 12, 2001 so that I could share my vision and demonstrate my enthusiasm for the project to my father in person. Needless-to-say, my flight was cancelled. A few days after watching the Twin Towers fall (I had a direct line of sight from my Brooklyn fire escape) I hitched a ride with a friend to Boston where a neighbor of my sister graciously lent me her maroon Ford Tempo (named “Ruby”) for a surreal 63 hour solo drive from Boston to the base camp of Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada of California where I met some friends who were there for a short backpacking trip. 

During about a month of recuperation in Malibu I convinced my father that we should endeavor to transform the substance of Plots Unlimited along the lines I had proposed. We hired Kenneth Colby’s son Peter, himself a programmer who had helped his dad create a ground-breaking software program (about 40 years ahead of its time) called Overcoming Depression, to build an editing tool that would help me in my task of transforming Plots Unlimited. 

After driving Ruby back to her owner in Boston I settled into post-9/11 New York City and set out on my task. It was during the Fall and Winter of 2001, close to the epicenter of the recent attacks - where the world suddenly felt very small, and ripples of social, political, economic and psychological change pulsed into the cultural milieu, that I disembarked from the constraints of Plotto/Plots Unlimited and began to use my mind’s eye to transcribe social phenomena from the dramas of my own life, and from movies, tv shows, novels and news stories, into a growing collection of universal narrative primitives. After about three months I had a first draft of approximately 2,000 situations. During my experience of composing this initial draft, the Mindset/Action framework emerged as the obvious way to classify the narrative situations, and I began to make two lists of concepts that eventually became the Mindset and Action categories.

By May of 2002 I had returned to Malibu and was working with Peter Colby to develop my growing collection of narrative situations into a Windows-based software program. During one excruciating week I spent long days with my father at his dining room table reviewing the situations one-by-one. It was at this time that I had to defend my vision of the corpus as a striving toward objectivity and resisted my dad’s desire to embellish the primitive situations with drama. The result was somewhat of a compromise, but my dad essentially conceded to my vision. From 2002 - 2012 Storybase Software for Writers (featuring 2,363 narrative situations) sold several thousand copies, generated positive reviews from industry publications and inspired a devoted fan base of professional and amateur writers who used Storybase to develop countless novels and screenplays.

Circa 2006 I became interested in creating a print version of Storybase. I met with Joost Elffers, a notable Greenwich Village based book packager and, with his encouragement, purchased a copy of Quark, bought a few books on typography and began the process of setting Storybase to type, which resulted in a burst of creativity. I expanded, re-wrote, and further simplified the Storybase corpus in anticipation of print publication. I hired a programmer on Rent-a-Coder.com to create a software tool to arrange the situations in order (for a given font) based on text width - I had discovered an intriguing method for setting the entire corpus as one continuous block of text (in the Avenir font), which resulted in the image on the cover of this book. 

When initial efforts to find a publisher were not successful, I put the project on hiatus and focused my efforts elsewhere. More recently, during the summer of 2019, I revisited the corpus with the intention of producing an eBook and it was during this process that the Cause and Consequence and Intersubjective linkages were added. I’m very pleased to release this refined and expanded iteration of The Taxonomy of Human Experience as an eBook. 

Wylie Sawyer

Norwalk, CT

January, 2021