Novel Writing Support System by Target Readers’ Story Arcs and Characters’ Emotional Changes

Abstract

Writing includes such elements of communication skills as expressing authorial intention in an understandable way that is acceptable to readers. Our research introduces a writing activity that cultivates communication skills by introducing a method for writing novels that are liked by the estimated target readers. An aspect of novels that may reflect individual preferences is the emotional experience produced by them. Therefore, this research proposes a method for creating novels that are liked by target readers from an emotional viewpoint. We first adopt story arcs as a representation of a reader model that expresses the emotional changes that readers are expected to experience from a novel. Second, we define the candidates of emotions for designing scenes from the viewpoint of the emotions of characters. Last, we develop a support system that not only suggests candidates for story arcs and characters’ emotions but also provides feedback when the emotions selected for characters fail to support the selected story arc.