2026-09-02
PLOT
Tadeusz Kowalski spent three years going straight after his last stint, working graveyard shifts at a fish cannery on the docks. Then Birgitta Svensson walks into his life with a revolver and his week’s pay. When Officer Yilmaz drags her into the precinct, Tadeusz does the unthinkable: he claims he gifted her the cash, tanking the robbery charge. What he doesn’t know is that Birgitta runs his old crew now. She leverages his sacrifice like a chain around his neck, forcing him into one last job—a payroll heist that’ll either set them both free or send Tadeusz back to the cage he barely escaped. The night of the score, Tadeusz switches the take with marked bills and tips Yilmaz. Birgitta goes down, but the cop buries Tadeusz’s involvement. Finally clean.
Show the Plotto chain
- Person
- A Lawless Person
- Action
- Seeking to save a person who is accused of transgression
- Outcome
- Emerges happily from a serious entanglement.
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#894
Deliverance
The protagonist, robbed by a criminal and wishing to save them from the law, declares to the officer of the law who has arrested the criminal that they gave the criminal the stolen property in their possession.
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#923
Idealism
The protagonist, a reformed criminal, is trying to go straight. The protagonist, a reformed criminal trying to go straight, is compelled by the criminal—the leader of their old gang—to take part in a criminal enterprise.
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 more info, check out the project page and say hello.
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.