Plotter: Operationalizing the Master Book of All Plots

Abstract

Pulp fiction author William Wallace Cook published Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots in 1928, which contains almost 2000 plot fragments and relatively formal instructions on how human authors could combine them to produce plots behind novels. In this paper we show one way that the methods in this book can be used to computationally generate plots from the fragments. We also show sample plots generated by our system called Plotter that uses this method. Finally we use them to discuss idiosyncrasies and limitations of the book.