Circular plots

The plot wheels of Erle Stanley Gardner:




(Cf. Harry Stephen Keeler's "webwork" plot construction.)

*

You know, the chemist Friedrich August Kekule worked for twenty years
trying to figure out the structure of the benzene ring, and he
couldn’t do it. And then one night he was sleeping and he had a vision
of a snake swallowing its tail. So he told his students about it and
they said, ‘Not bad, you go to sleep and you wake up with that.’ And
he said, ‘Visions come to prepared spirits.’ The way Billy Wilder put
it was ‘The muse has to know where to find you.’ —David Milch, in this New Yorker piece<

Both hot links via Sam