TaleStream: Supporting Story Ideation with Trope Knowledge

Story ideation is a critical part of the story-writing process. It is challenging to support computationally due to its exploratory and subjective nature. Tropes, which are recurring narrative elements 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 story ideation. We present TaleStream, a canvas system that uses tropes as building blocks of stories while providing steerable suggestions of story ideas in the form of tropes. Our trope 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 ideation materials than random tropes. Our system evaluation suggests that TaleStream can support writers’ creative flow and greatly facilitates story development. Tropes, as a rich lexicon of narratives with available examples, play a key role in TaleStream and hold promise for story-creation support systems.

Introduction. Finding original and engaging ideas to create compelling stories is a challenging task for authors. Efforts in developing writing support systems have focused on continuing stories by producing text blocks to add and edit [56, 65]. However, beyond sentence generation, previous research has suggested that the main strength and use cases of such tools lie in their suggestive power to help overcome writer’s block [6, 17, 24, 75]. In this regard, the focus of our work is to build a system that supports story writing by providing inspiring materials. To ideate stories, drawing inspiration from existing stories is essential as authors consciously or unconsciously borrow story elements from each other. Such shared elements have been theorized by structuralists since the early 20th century [59]. To develop their own stories, authors often rely on well-known narrative structures such as the Hero’s Journey, on common narrative devices creating or resolving conflicts like Love Triangles, or on archetypal characters such as the Diabolical Mastermind.

Discussion / Conclusion. In this paper, we introduce TaleStream, a canvas system that suggests story ideas in the form of tropes. The trope and text elements on the canvas can be selected to generate trope suggestions which can be explored with movie examples and steered with additional controls on the story space. Our technical evaluation of the suggestion algorithms shows that our methods provide valuable results with different characterizations. The system evaluation revealed that TaleStream supports creative abilities for story ideation, provides reliable controllability, and is perceived as a pleasant partner accompanying the creative flow. The use of tropes in TaleStream was found to be particularly effective for quickly visualizing ideas through references, being aware of common pitfalls, and structuring stories, making users more confident while creating. This work opens up new ways to leverage tropes to support story creation as an intermediate comprehensive lexicon of storytelling.