TaleStream: Supporting Story Ideation with Trope Knowledge

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Story ideation is a critical and creative part of the story-writing process. It is challenging to support it computationally due to its exploratory and subjective nature. Tropes, which are narrative elements recurring across stories, are essential in stories as they shape the structure of narratives and our understanding of them. In this paper, we propose to use tropes as an intermediate representation of stories to approach narrative design. We present TaleStream, a canvas system that uses tropes as building blocks of stories and provides steerable suggestions of story ideas in the form of tropes. Our suggestion methods leverage data from the tvtropes.org wiki. We find that 97% of the time, trope suggestions generated by our methods provide better story materials than random tropes. Our system evaluation suggests that TaleStream can support writers’ creative flow and greatly facilitates developing stories. Tropes, as a rich lexicon of narratives with available examples, play a key role in TaleStream and hold promise for story ideation.

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/qg799fn4408
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/qg799fn4408

License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal license (CC0).

Preferred citation: Chou, J., Siu, A., Lipka, N., Rossi, R., Dernoncourt, F., and Agrawala, M. (2023). TaleStream: Supporting Story Ideation with Trope Knowledge. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/qg799fn4408. https://doi.org/10.25740/qg799fn4408.

Master's Theses, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University

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