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Contents Updated: Saturday, 9 August 2008

The Polti Plot Outline

If a computer could write you a story, then you as a storyteller are redundant. You know what you want to write. The outlines are to stimulate your thinking, and help you overcome writer’s block. The plot outliner simply juxtaposes, not in any logical way, some Polti categories to give you ideas for plots. Often a broad situation is given first, then a few plot outlines to use as a main and subplots—you decide which, or how you blend them with the story you already have. The logic of your own story is your’s.

Powerlessness can be explored with the theme of the impending death or destruction of a loved one, such as bringing misfortune upon one’s people through secrecy. The victim beseeches everyone, though they have no power to save, while someone else vainly appeals to the executioner, whose haughty, sardonic, figure dominates, intensifying the keenness of the grief by his pleasure in it. The debt that must be paid. Nemesis! Casablanca, where Rick has what he wants but the woman he loves, and he gives up all he had despite himself, for her sake.

The protagonist is unfoundedly jealous of a lover through some mistake by a third party who is innocent. The author of the unfounded jealousy might not be personified because he does not exist, the jealousy being a malicious rumour, or the intrigues, multiplied ad lib, of a traitor to the jealous one motivated from a rival of the jealous one suggesting to the jealous one and his lover reciprocally. Many even improbable variations are generally acceptable in this situation. The outcome might be a divorce, but may be more forceful via instrumental characters. Beneath what seems the final depth of misfortune for a people opens another more frightful still. Examples are oppressed ghettos, the Albigensian crusade, and so on.

The protagonist is an avenger. The ignoble avenger seeks vengence on a perceived wrongdoer’s nation, for a robbery to another, which seemed just but was not, and only happened because the protagonist was absent elsewhere. The avenger might pardon the wrongdoer because of compassion. Rather than directly to the avenger, the wrong was done to the avenger’s loved one, an injuring of a descendant, or attempting to rape a woman friend. The avenger is another wrongdoer. Any situation can be combined with any other as this outliner does, in sub-plots, the characters being precipitated from one combination of situations into another.

We tend to dread the victor and pity the vanquished, but both antagonist and protagonist are aspects of ourselves, so both must exist in their own right. It is impossible to love or hate a cartoon character or a stage prop unless we are immature.

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• Marienbad Muser: Plot generator Like Marienbad and Polti mixed! More Polti than Marienbad.
• Literary Criticism Self generating literary criticism
• Bishop Ecclesiasticus Christian-like babble generator
• FIBA (Frederick Ignatius Baines Archive) More Holy Bibble generated
• Impeach the war criminals, Bush and Blair—draft letter generator—for you to send
• Or go to the directory index for “The Great Critic Speaks”, Chomsky-like text generator, and more.