2026-03-28
PLOT
When Judge Thibodaux breaks his word and forces Céleste to marry rich Arceneaux instead of poor aviator Boudreaux, the bitter pilot kidnaps her during a joyride, eloping across the Louisiana sky. But their stolen happiness sours in his childhood home, where Céleste clashes endlessly with his domineering Mémère. Years of resentment poison their marriage until tragedy strikes—their son Petit Jean dies in an accident. Only then does Boudreaux recognize how his lifelong bitterness destroyed everything he touched, finding redemption in accepting responsibility for the wreckage of his own making.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Resentful Person
- Action
- Becoming involved in a hopeless love affair, and seeking to make the best of a disheartening situation
- Outcome
- Achieves a spiritual victory.
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#313
Love’s Rejection
The protagonist has been promised the love interest in marriage by the love interest's parent; but the love interest's parent, false to their promise, compels the love interest to marry the rival, a wealthier person than the protagonist.
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#234b
Love’s Rejection
The protagonist, an aviator, is a person of masterful character. The protagonist, an aviator, in love with the love interest and in disfavor with the love interest's parents, induces the love interest to take a ride in their airplane; and then the protagonist elopes with the love interest along the sky lanes.
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#384
Marriage
The protagonist and their spouse, married, live with the protagonist's parent. The spouse quarrels with the protagonist's parent, and with the protagonist on account of the protagonist's parent.
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#1068
Personal Limitations
The co-protagonist comes to understand the destructiveness of their selfish outlook upon life when one of their children dies.
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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.