2026-03-17
PLOT
In rain-soaked Detroit, mechanic Dauod has spent five years drowning his grief in bourbon, convinced his daughter Layla died in a house fire. His wife left, his shop’s failing, and he’s become a ghost of himself. Then he overhears two thugs mention ‘Layla Kassem’ during a drug deal—his supposedly dead child is alive, running narcotics for the Syrian mob. When Dauod tracks her down, he discovers she faked her death to escape his suffocating expectations of respectability. But their reunion turns deadly when she’s arrested for murder, and his desperate attempt to save her only exposes how little he truly knew about who she’d become.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Married Person
- Action
- Rebelling against a power that controls personal abilities and holds them in subjection
- Outcome
- Discovers the folly of trying to appear otherwise than as one is in reality.
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#674
Misfortune
The protagonist loses their child, in whom all their ambitions were centered. The protagonist struggles against an overwhelming sorrow that proves an obstacle to enterprise and holds their abilities in subjection.
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#1053
Chance
The protagonist hears by chance a familiar name, and the name solves a riddle of the past. The protagonist, hearing by chance a familiar name, finds their long-lost child.
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#928b
Idealism
The protagonist is proud of their child. Their child dies a shameful, inglorious death, bringing dishonor and sorrow to the protagonist.
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#821
Helpfulness
The protagonist's child is arrested for committing a crime. The protagonist seeks to save their child from misfortune and becomes involved in an unpleasant complication.
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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 to follow along this little adventure, subscribe to the weekly email.
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.