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.

Story Canvas is a visual authoring tool for the creation of interactive, generative stories. Aimed at authors without a technical background in computational storytelling, our system takes an existing author goal-based narrative planning architecture and adds a highly visual authoring and reading interface to the technology, using the language of storyboards and comics as a framework for both authoring and interacting with the resulting narratives. In this paper we describe Story Canvas and its evolution from our previous authoring work, including how our interface choices have been driven by our previous experiences with non-technical authors, and describe the details of translating the visual authoring constructs into story plans within the story generator.