2026-03-21
PLOT
Reformed criminal Esperanza has been clean for two years when street thief Niko pickpockets her outside a diner. After Detective Moussa arrests him, Esperanza shocks everyone by claiming she gave Niko the stolen cash voluntarily, securing his release. But her lie creates a debt: Niko turns out to be her former gang leader, and he leverages her compassion to force her back into the life she escaped. As Esperanza struggles between her redemption and protecting someone who doesn’t deserve it, she discovers that sometimes saving others means first learning to save yourself.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Protecting Person
- Action
- Seeking to save a person who is accused of transgression
- Outcome
- Achieves success and happiness in a hard undertaking.
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#894
Deliverance
The protagonist, robbed by a criminal and wishing to save them from the law, declares to the officer of the law who has arrested the criminal that they gave the criminal the stolen property in their possession.
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#923
Idealism
The protagonist, a reformed criminal, is trying to go straight. The protagonist, a reformed criminal trying to go straight, is compelled by the criminal—the leader of their old gang—to take part in a criminal enterprise.
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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.