Plottomatic — 2026-03-25

2026-03-25

PLOT

Starving and delirious with fever in Depression-era Louisiana, Boudreaux Thibodaux gratefully accepts food and money from enigmatic Clémentine Broussard, who confesses she’s a bootlegger. Desperate for the reward money, Boudreaux betrays her to Sheriff Guidry. But when Clémentine seemingly dies in the raid, guilt consumes him. Boudreaux fakes his own death and haunts Guidry as a vengeful specter, driving the corrupt sheriff to madness. Eventually, Boudreaux realizes his ‘ghostly pursuer’ is merely his own fractured psyche, and emerges from the swamps a broken but wiser man.

Theme: Southern Gothic

Category: Enterprise

Conflict: Helpfulness Conflict: Craftiness Conflict: Revenge Conflict: Mystery

Show the Plotto chain

Person: Any Person
Action: Being delivered from misfortune by one who, in confidence, confesses a secret of transgression
Outcome: Emerges from a trying ordeal with sorely garnered wisdom.

#831 Helpfulness
The protagonist, ill and starving, receives food and money from their ally. The ally tells the protagonist in confidence that they are a bootlegger.
#1269 Craftiness
The protagonist discovers their friend's secret transgression. The protagonist informs the authorities of their friend's secret transgression and receives the reward for their friend's capture.
#1313b Revenge
The protagonist, supposed to be dead, plays the role of a ghost. The protagonist, supposed dead, plays the role of ghost and, as a method of reprisal, haunts their enemy, the rival.
#1332 Mystery
The protagonist flees from a pursuer who is wholly imaginary.

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.