Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
narrative strategies
story writing
novice writers
strategy reuse
creative adaptation
Narrix: Remixing Narrative Strategies from Examples for Story Writing
🤖 AI Summary
Novice writers often struggle to identify and reuse narrative strategies employed in professional storytelling. This work proposes a novel approach that, for the first time, explicitly decomposes narrative strategies into localized units, visualized through color-coded lexical cues and emotional arc representations. An interactive, multidimensional track-based interface enables users to drag and recombine strategy blocks, facilitating intuitive composition. The system integrates strategy-guided controllable text generation to support both strategic reuse and creative adaptation at the narrative-strategy level. A user study (N=12) demonstrates that, compared to chat-based writing tools, this method significantly enhances users’ recall of narrative strategies, confidence in their application, and capacity for creative expression.
📝 Abstract
Experienced storytellers decompose stories into local narrative strategies and how these strategies shape higher-level arcs. This decomposition helps writers recognize patterns in others' work and adapt those patterns to tell new stories. Novices, however, struggle to identify these strategies or to reuse them effectively. We present Narrix, a novel writing tool that helps novice writers recognize narrative strategies in example stories and repurpose these strategies in their own writing. Narrix analyzes strategies in example stories, highlights them with color-coded lexical cues and explanations, and situates them on an interactive story arc for exploration by emotional shifts and turning points. Writers then drag strategies onto multi-dimensional tracks and apply block-scoped edits to revise or continue their drafts through controlled generation steered by specified strategies. Through a within-subjects study (N=12), Narrix showed improved participants' retention, confidence, and creative adaptation of narrative strategies compared to a baseline chat-based writing interface.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
narrative strategies
controlled generation
interactive story arc
block-scoped editing
writing assistance tool
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