2026-03-26
PLOT
Marine biologist Nkechi disappears from her ship while investigating mysterious deep-sea lights that pulse in sync with observers’ thoughts. Found days later on a remote island, she claims the phenomena are sentient beings communicating through shared hallucinations. As reality and vision blur, Nkechi attempts suicide to escape her fractured mind. But realizing her terror of the unknown has distorted her perception, she returns to the ocean depths. There she discovers the lights are actually an ancient symbiotic organism that enhances human intuition. Embracing this gift transforms her into a pioneering researcher of consciousness itself.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- Any Person
- Action
- Engaging in an enterprise and then mysteriously disappearing
- Outcome
- Achieves success and happiness in a hard undertaking.
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#1414b
Mystery
The protagonist is carrying out an unusual enterprise. The protagonist vanishes mysteriously from a ship in mid-ocean.
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#1357
Mystery
The protagonist is investigating psychic phenomena. The protagonist meets with disaster when illusion becomes reality through the overthrow of their reason.
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#705
Misfortune
The protagonist, unable to conquer their misfortunes, seeks to escape them by committing suicide.
-
#1351
Mystery
The protagonist decides that what they have come to consider a danger is merely a fancied danger inspired by fear. The protagonist, in order to shatter their fear complex, plunges into a supposed fancied danger that proves to be real.
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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.