2026-09-16
TODAY’S PLOT
Bato Ocampo buries his love for Yves Durand when his grandmother Lola demands he abandon the relationship. Yves refuses to vanish quietly—he reinvents himself, charming Lola as a respectable stranger while concealing his identity. Desperate and isolated, Bato confides the combination to his office safe to his business partner Miriam Qasim, trusting her with the location of incriminating ledgers. But Miriam’s knowledge makes her a target. When criminals discover the connection, they seize Yves and force him to extract the combination—threatening Bato’s life if he refuses. Yves must betray the man he loves to save him, while Bato finally understands that duty without compassion destroys everything it claims to protect.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Protecting Person
- Action
- Forsaking cherished ambitions to carry out an obligation
- Outcome
- Emerges from a trying ordeal with sorely garnered wisdom.
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#282a
Love’s Rejection
The protagonist's sense of filial obligation is so strong that, when ordered by their parent not to marry the love interest, the person they love, they give them up.
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#241
Love’s Rejection
The love interest, in love with the protagonist and disapproved of by the protagonist's parent, seeks as an unknown to impress the protagonist's parent with their character and charm.
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#616
Misfortune
The protagonist has confided to the co-protagonist the combination of their safe, X. The protagonist, confiding to the co-protagonist the combination of their safe, X, brings danger to the co-protagonist.
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#144
Love’s Misadventures
The love interest, in the hands of enemies of the protagonist, is being forced to do their bidding by threats of violence against the protagonist, whom they love.
Hello, what is this?
Plottomatic is a daily plot machine designed to demonstrate a new and modernized version of Plotto, William Wallace Cook’s 1928 book and system for generating plots.
What's Plotto and why a modernized version?
William Wallace Cook was a prolific writer who created a strange and ingenious system for building plots: Plotto. I rewrote the manuscript to remove the antiquated 1928 discriminatory language while preserving the original structure and logic.
More info on making this: Plottomatic: rewriting a 1928 plot machine .
How does Plottomatic work?
Plottomatic walks through this new version of Plotto and chooses a protagonist, an action, and an outcome. Then it builds a series of dramatic situations that are chosen using the original Cook logic. Finally, it transforms the finished plot structure into a readable synopsis that adds characters, theme, and setting. That’s the daily plot you see above.
Are you making a new book or an app?
I’m glad you asked! Not yet – but wouldn't that be great? If you want more info, check out the project page and say hello.
Acknowledgements
William Wallace Cook wrote Plotto in 1928.
Gary Kacmarcik digitized the original book and created the original and foundational hyperlinked edition.
David Eyk created an XML version using Gary’s work and fixed some cross-reference links. I used this as the source file.
Pankaj Agarwal built a Flutter implementation that helped me shape the data model.
Lynn Cherny wrote an in-depth analysis of Plotto in 2018 that quantified the gender and race issues as well as other structural problems.