2026-05-01
PLOT
Small-time art dealer Bosko desperately needs antiquarian Farah’s rare Ottoman manuscript to save his failing gallery. She refuses every offer—it belonged to her grandmother. During their heated negotiations, attraction sparks between them. Farah agrees to consider selling if Bosko abandons his shady forgery sideline. But when a crooked collector offers triple for a fake, Bosko can’t resist. Farah discovers his betrayal and cuts all contact. Months later, she learns Bosko lost everything—gallery, reputation, freedom—in a forgery scandal that destroyed him completely.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- An Erring Person
- Action
- Seeking to forward an enterprise and encountering family sentiment as an obstacle
- Outcome
- Reverses certain opinions when their fallacy is revealed.
-
#1138
Personal Limitations
The protagonist seeks professionally to secure a desired object, X, from the co-protagonist. The protagonist, seeking to secure a desired object, X, from the co-protagonist, finds the object so dearly prized because of family associations that the co-protagonist will not part with it at any price.
-
#20a
Love’s Beginning
The protagonist seeks to buy an object, X, from the love interest, an object they greatly desire. The love interest will not sell. The protagonist and the love interest, while engaged in a commercial transaction, fall in love.
-
#41b
Love’s Misadventures
The protagonist has promised the love interest that they will give up a practice which the love interest considers discreditable. The protagonist, yielding to temptation, proves false to a promise they made their sweetheart, the love interest, and an estrangement follows.
-
#163
Love’s Misadventures
The love interest learns that the protagonist has fallen into desperate misfortune.
Subscribe!
Subscribe to my newsletter Super Secret Notes to get updates about this project, building a plot app, and rebuilding the Plotto book. (Plus occasional secret news about new projects).
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.