Evolutionary Stitching of Plot Units with Character Threads

Abstract

Ideation of novel narrative plots is often achieved by recombination of elements from prior plots. This approach presents two challenges: what elements to select from prior narratives, and how to find a new combination that makes sense without replicating any of the originals. The present paper relies on prior results for representing elementary narrative units for plot representation that both respect connectivity across a plot and allow a high degree of abstraction from previous instances of plot. An evolutionary procedure is applied to search the space of possible combinations, driven by metrics on coherent connectivity across plot units.