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.

翻译：故事情节构思是故事写作过程中的关键环节。由于其探索性和主观性，通过计算手段加以支持颇具挑战性。套路——即故事中反复出现的叙事元素——在塑造叙事结构及我们对叙事的理解方面至关重要。本文提出以套路作为故事的中层表征，以辅助故事情节构思。我们推出了TaleStream这一画布系统，该系统将套路作为故事的基本构建模块，同时以可调控的方式提供基于套路的故事情节构思建议。我们的套路建议方法利用了tvtropes.org维基百科的数据。实验发现，97%的情况下，基于我们方法生成的套路建议能比随机套路提供更优质的故事情节构思素材。系统评估表明，TaleStream能够支持写作者的创作心流，并极大促进故事发展。作为包含丰富示例的叙事词汇库，套路在TaleStream中发挥着关键作用，并对未来故事创作支持系统具有重要潜力。