Plottomatic — 2026-03-18

2026-03-18

PLOT

Cartographer Yuki, mapping remote Appalachian peaks, becomes snowbound in a desolate cabin where they encounter reclusive local Batul. Desperate for companionship, Yuki struggles to befriend the suspicious woman, but their urban sensibilities clash with her mountain ways. When Yuki suffers a near-fatal fall, Batul nurses them back to health—finally offering the friendship Yuki had craved. But Batul reveals her suicidal despair over a terminal illness. To spare her family shame, Yuki destroys Batul’s confession letter and tells authorities she died of consumption. Years later, impoverished and scorned as a failed academic, Yuki treasures this one act of compassion as their greatest achievement.

Theme: Gothic

Category: Enterprise

Conflict: Misfortune Conflict: Mistaken Judgment Conflict: Deliverance Conflict: Idealism

Show the Plotto chain

Person: A Married Person
Action: Meeting with misfortune and being cast away in a primitive, isolated and savage environment
Outcome: Comes finally to the blank wall of enigma.

#685 Misfortune
The protagonist, traveling alone, is caught in a snowstorm in the mountains, becomes snowbound, marooned, and finds it impossible to reach a place of safety.
#762 Mistaken Judgment
The protagonist struggles in vain for the friendship of an associate. The protagonist meets with a fatal accident. The protagonist, after their death, receives the friendship of an associate—for which they had vainly struggled in life.
#868 Deliverance
The protagonist, destroying a letter in which their ally declares they are about to commit suicide, makes it appear that the ally died of a contagious disease.
#944 Idealism
The protagonist is an honorable person of the old school, who comes through life enduring with patient fortitude every manner of misfortune; and then, at last, poverty stricken and pronounced a failure according to all the material standards of the world, they still cling to their high ideals and count their vicissitudes, which could not overcome their ideals, as blessings in disguise.

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.