The Need for Multi-Aspectual Representation of Narratives in Modelling their Creative Process

Existing approaches to narrative construction tend to apply basic engineering principles of system
design which rely on identifying the most relevant feature of the domain for the problem at
hand, and postulating an initial representation of the problem space organised around such a
principal feature. Some features that have been favoured in the past include: causality, linear
discourse, underlying structure, and character behavior. The present paper defends the need for
simultaneous consideration of as many as possible of these aspects when attempting to model the
process of creating narratives, together with some mechanism for distributing the weight of the
decision processes across them. Humans faced with narrative construction may shift from views
based on characters to views based on structure, then consider causality, and later also take into
account the shape of discourse. This behavior can be related to the process of representational
re-description of constraints as described in existing literature on cognitive models of the writing
task. The paper discusses how existing computational models of narrative construction address
this phenomenon, and argues for a computational model of narrative explicitly based on multiple
aspects.