2026-03-20
PLOT
Bitter art dealer Bogdan thinks he’s found the companion to his prized Byzantine medallion, only to realize criminal Vasily sold him back his own stolen artifact. When lover Kehinde betrays him and threatens exposure of his past crimes, Bogdan flees town. Years later, he returns incognito to find daughter Naia idolizing his memory as a noble father. Hired by mysterious Mirabelle to destroy rival collector Thaddeus, Bogdan instead warns his target and sacrifices his fortune to protect both his false reputation and newfound conscience.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Resentful Person
- Action
- Finding (apparently) an object greatly coveted, and obtaining (apparently) the object
- Outcome
- Makes the supreme sacrifice in carrying out an undertaking.
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#1165
Simulation
The protagonist is an art collector. X1 and X2 are very rare and valuable art objects, the only two in the world. The protagonist owns an objet d'art, X1; and they buy X2, as they suppose, which is an exact duplicate of X1, from the criminal, only to discover that they have repurchased X1 which the scheming criminal had stolen from their collection.
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#224
Love’s Rejection
The love interest proves false to the protagonist; and the protagonist fears the love interest will reveal a secret that will cause them trouble if it becomes known.
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#797
Mistaken Judgment
The protagonist is a transgressor, long mysteriously missing from home. The protagonist, a transgressor, returning as a mysterious stranger to home, finds their child reverencing their memory as of a great and noble person.
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#818a
Helpfulness
The protagonist, well-to-do and of good family, is impersonating a person who is down and out. The protagonist has been hired by a stranger to circulate an infamous slander against the co-protagonist. The protagonist, hired by a stranger to injure the co-protagonist, meets the co-protagonist, their sympathy goes out to them, and they revolt against the stranger's scheme and warn the co-protagonist.
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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.