Dans le numéro de mars d'Asimov Science Fiction sera publié un article de Robert Silverberg.

Il est déjà en ligne ici.

Voici le début.

Citation:

Along time ago—1973, as a matter of fact—Sherry Gottlieb, who used to run a science fiction bookstore in Los Angeles, gave me a copy of a book called The Plot Genie, which was intended, an even longer time ago, to provide writers with handy formulas for constructing stories. Sherry inscribed the book to me with these tender words: “To Bob Silverberg—I hope this helps you get through those trying times and slumps. If you learn to use this, you may be able to sell a story or something.” I came upon it the other day in a dusty corner of my office. Apparently I haven’t been using it much in the last few decades. Of course, I don’t write as much fiction as I used to, either. But there are plenty of other writers out there trying to make a living by selling stories, and it occurred to me that knowing about this book might be of great value to them. The copy of The Plot Genie that Sherry sent me back in the halcyon days of the Nixon administration is the third edition, dated 1932. The author was one Wycliffe A. Hill, described on the title page as “Author Inventor”—from other sources I learn that he wrote screenplays for silent films—and the publisher was the Ernest E. Gagnon Company of Los Angeles. Mr. Hill tells us that about 1915 the great movie director Cecil B. de Mille rejected a story idea of his “with the kindly criticism that ‘although an interesting narrative, it contains no dramatic plot.’” This set him searching for an understanding of the difference between narrative and plot. Upon learning that someone had published a book that claimed to list all the basic dramatic situations—thirty-six in number, he tells us—he bought a copy and began “an intensive study and analysis of dramatic plot building,” which led in 1918 to his writing a book called Ten Million Photoplay Plots. He followed this in 1921 with The Art of Dramatic Plot Building, and then The Writers’ Guide (1925), which brought him finally to the creation of his masterpiece, The Plot Genie.