Americas Plot Generator
Generate plots from Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada: silver towns, sugar islands, fur posts and the revolutions that remade them, each with a protagonist who has a stake in how it turns out.
- Sample
Short Weight at Potosí
Potosí, 1640s. Tomás Quispe, an Indigenous assistant in the royal mint, has noticed that the silver coins leaving the mint carry less silver than the law requires. He wants to keep his post and keep his family off the mita labor rolls. When a royal inspector arrives to investigate the debased coinage, the mint's officials need someone to hang, and they have already chosen Tomás.
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Glass in the Classroom
Halifax, December 6, 1917. Schoolteacher Margaret Doyle is at her window when the munitions ship Mont-Blanc explodes in the harbor after colliding with the Imo. Her school is flattened, and the newspapers blame her younger brother, a clerk at the naval dockyard, for letting the ship in. The one witness who can clear him is a wounded Norwegian sailor from the Imo, and he is about to be shipped home.
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The Neighbor's Bell
Near Manzanillo, Cuba, October 1868. Joaquín, an enslaved sugar master, hears the bell ring at La Demajagua, where Carlos Manuel de Céspedes has just freed his slaves and declared war on Spain. Joaquín wants freedom for himself and his daughter. His own master offers it in writing, after the harvest, if Joaquín keeps the mill running while the master rides off to join Céspedes.
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Her Soldier's Voice
Set during the American Civil War, a Southern belle disguises herself as a Union soldier to rescue her captured husband, only to find herself a hero amidst a sea of men, perpetually living a lie.
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Partners in Sorrow
In 16th century North America, an Apache tribesman and a Spanish Conquistador form an unlikely alliance to save their people from a deadly smallpox outbreak, stirring tension and redefining loyalty.
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The Anvil of Liberty
Based in colonial Boston, a humble blacksmith uncovers a plot to ignite the American Revolution prematurely; threatened by both sides, he must work covertly to prevent a disaster.
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Knocking on Capone's Door
In the roaring 1920s, a penniless immigrant rises through the ranks of organized crime in Chicago. As he builds his empire, he begins to question if the American Dream is worth the price paid.
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In the Shadow of Temples
At the height of the Mayan civilization, a commoner's child is mistaken to be the incarnation of a god, leading to lavish treatment, power struggles, and conspiracy within the Priesthood.
Americas: what makes the plot work
Americas fiction spans the continents of North and South America, exploring their indigenous cultures, colonial histories, and modern complexities.
Treat each colony as its own country
New Spain, Peru, Portuguese Brazil, French Saint-Domingue and New France ran on different laws, languages and economies. Isabel Allende's Island Beneath the Sea follows Zarité, an enslaved woman in Saint-Domingue, through the revolution that made Haiti and on to New Orleans. Choose your empire first, because it decides what your character can own, marry and believe.
Know the caste and race laws
Spanish America sorted people into castas by ancestry, and the French colonies had the Code Noir and a large class of free people of color with property and grievances of their own. A character's legal category can be their whole plot problem. Find out what it let them inherit, testify to or wear.
Let politics split the family
Independence wars, the Mexican Revolution and the dictatorships that followed set siblings against each other. Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, who opposed Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and three of whom were murdered in 1960. Give each family member a different reason to choose a side.
Give Canada its own fault lines
Canadian history has conflicts many readers south of the border never learned: New France and the Conquest of 1759, the fur trade, and the Métis resistance led by Louis Riel at Red River in 1869 and in the North-West in 1885. Brian Moore's Black Robe follows a young Jesuit traveling upriver to a mission among the Huron in the 1630s, and it reads nothing like a western.
More Historical Fiction plot generators
Or see the whole shelf: Historical Fiction plot ideas.
World War 2Generate World War II plots built on a real front, a real year and a person with something to hide.
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United StatesGenerate plots from American history that start with a region, a law and a person it squeezes.
20th CenturyGenerate plots set in the century of telegrams, newsreels, partitions and moon suits.
19th CenturyGenerate 19th century plots driven by what moved that century: wills and railway shares, gold fields and cotton mills, gaslight and the telegraph.
18th CenturyGenerate 18th century plots built from the period's own machinery: bills of exchange, press gangs, lotteries, pamphlets and slow ships.
American RevolutionGenerate American Revolution plots that look past the famous signatures: farm wives paid in British silver, printers working both sides, militiamen far from Boston.
Civil WarGenerate Civil War plots that put a person on a real road, in a real siege or on a real date between Fort Sumter and Reconstruction.
Ancient AmericasGenerate plots set in the Americas before the conquest: Mexica merchants, Maya courts, Inca record keepers and the great houses of Chaco Canyon.
Ancient EgyptGenerate ancient Egypt plots from three thousand years of history, from the crews who hauled stone at Giza to the copyists of Ptolemaic Alexandria.
Ancient GreeceGenerate ancient Greek plots grounded in real history: plague years in Athens, chariot races at Olympia, the last days of a Bronze Age palace.
Ancient RomeGenerate plots from Rome's thousand years, from the last bloody elections of the Republic to the frontier forts of the Empire, each built around someone with a…
BritishGenerate plots from Britain's past, from Tudor priories to Victorian slums to the Blitz, built around someone placed exactly where class, religion or the crown…
RegencyGenerate Regency plots with a real obstacle between the couple, whether an entail, a debt of honor or a brother at Waterloo, and a whole Season of watchful…
EuropeanGenerate plots from Europe's past, from Venetian glass furnaces to Habsburg courts to Weimar Berlin, built around a character whose language, faith or border…
AsianGenerate plots set in Asia's past, from Song-dynasty exam halls to Joseon palaces to the Dutch post at Nagasaki, each tied to one place and one decade instead…
AfricanGenerate plots from Africa's long past, from Swahili trading towns to the Asante court to apartheid Johannesburg, built around people with their own ambitions…
Australian & OceanianGenerate plots from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific: convict ships, gold diggings, cane fields and the long reckoning between settlers and the…
MedievalGenerate medieval plots tied to a real century and place, from Constantinople in 1204 to Essex in 1381, where oaths, tithes and harvests matter as much as any sword.
BiographicalGenerate premises for novels about real people, built on what the records leave out: the missing year, the unsent letter, the person standing just outside the…
Christian FictionGenerate plots for faith-centered historical novels, where a character's belief is tested by a real time and place, from Huguenot France to the Dust Bowl, and…
Names, a first scene and a title
Questions about Americas plots
How is this different from US historical fiction?
US history has its own subgenres, from the American Revolution to the Civil War. This one covers the rest of the hemisphere: Spanish and Portuguese America, the Caribbean colonies of half a dozen empires, and Canada. The colonial powers, languages and churches differ, and so do the questions readers bring.
How should I portray Indigenous peoples in colonial-era stories?
Name the specific people, such as the Mexica, Taíno, Quechua-speaking Andeans or Wendat, rather than 'natives'. Use their own records where they exist, like Nahuatl-language accounts of the Spanish conquest, and give Indigenous characters goals that aren't only reactions to Europeans. A sensitivity reader from the community is worth the cost.
Should I write dialogue in Spanish, Portuguese or French?
Write it in English and keep the occasional word that won't translate cleanly: a title, a dish, an oath. Many writers now leave Spanish words in roman type rather than italics, so they don't read as foreign in the characters' own mouths. Whatever you choose, stay consistent through the book.
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Take it into Chapterly: outline it on a board, name the cast, and write chapter one tonight.
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