2026-03-24
PLOT
Parviz and Wilda, both fake art dealers, circle each other at gallery events, neither realizing they’re fellow fraudsters. When Wilda’s savvy friend Itziar exposes Parviz’s scheme, Wilda panics and flees to marry gentle Bertel, who adores her despite society calling him plain. Parviz, now blind from a botched con, marries Bertel thinking him beautiful. Bertel secretly pays Dr. Vang to restore Parviz’s sight, preparing for heartbreak. Meanwhile, Wilda embraces spectacular failure as her new business model, finding that public disasters bring unexpected opportunities.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Normal Person
- Action
- Assuming a fictitious character when embarking upon a certain enterprise
- Outcome
- Meets any fate, good or evil.
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#1173
Simulation
The protagonist, a pretender, encounters the co-protagonist, who is also a pretender. The protagonist and the co-protagonist are pretenders, yet neither knows that the other is not what they seem to be.
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#1462
Revelation
The co-protagonist's friend makes an important revelation regarding the protagonist which causes the co-protagonist to correct a serious error.
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#546b
Marriage
Their spouse, considered homely, marries a blind person, the protagonist, who thinks them surpassingly beautiful. Their spouse hires a noted eye-specialist to perform an operation on the eyes of their blind partner, the protagonist, whereby the protagonist's sight is restored.
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#933
Idealism
The co-protagonist decides that there is more to be gained by suffering defeat in an enterprise than by being successful.
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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.