Journal of Information and Telecommunication

ISSN: 2475-1839 (Print) 2475-1847 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tjit20

Plot-creation support with plot-construction

model for writing novels

Atsushi Ashida & Tomoko Kojiri

To cite this article: Atsushi Ashida & Tomoko Kojiri (2019) Plot-creation support with plot-
construction model for writing novels, Journal of Information and Telecommunication, 3:1, 57-73,
DOI: 10.1080/24751839.2018.1531232

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24751839.2018.1531232

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JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION
2019, VOL. 3, NO. 1, 57–73
https://doi.org/10.1080/24751839.2018.1531232

Plot-creation support with plot-construction model for writing

novels
Atsushi Ashidaa and Tomoko Kojirib
a
Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Kansai University, Suita, Japan; bFaculty of Engineering Science,
Kansai University, Suita, Japan

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

When starting to write a novel, an author often creates a structure Received 28 February 2018
for it, which is called the plot. The format of plots is not defined, Accepted 29 September 2018
and authors create plots using their own format. Unfortunately,
KEYWORDS
plots often do not include sufficient information and thus authors Novel writing; plot; creativity
may be unable to complete their novel. This study aims to support; plot-construction
support novice writers in creating a sufficient plot. We first analyse model
the items that support writing a novel and create a plot-
construction model. We then propose a support method for
creating plots by incorporating the concept of a story, which
corresponds to the events ordered along the time sequence of
the narrative world. Third, we define the format of the plot and
the story and implement the support method. We conducted
experiments to evaluate the validity of the plot and the story and
the effectiveness of the system, and found that the structures of
the plot and the story of already published novels could be
adequately constructed. In addition, our system helped authors
create plots for specific genres. As the number of participants in
the experiment was small, we need to conduct further
experiments to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our
system.

1. Introduction
The so-called ‘twenty-first century skills’ are now regarded as important skills to succeed in
twenty-first century society and various new learning/education methods have been pro-
posed to cultivate these skills (Griffin, McGaw, & Care, 2012). Writing novels requires the
twenty-first century skills of creativity, logical thinking, and presentation. Therefore, we
believe that novel writing is good training for cultivating the twenty-first century skills.
However, some authors, especially beginners, cannot complete the novels they have
begun to write. One reason may be that the contents to be written are not sufficiently
organized in advance.
Before writing a draft, authors consider the novel’s possible content and order and then
summarize these as a plot. The plot is a novel’s framework and describes the contents that
must be expressed, such as the novel’s settings, which contain characters and places, and

CONTACT Atsushi Ashida [email protected]

© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
58 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

the important events that occur. Since a plot description’s format is not formally defined,
its details depend on the individual author. Some authors fail to develop sufficient infor-
mation for writing a novel, and sometimes the plot’s contents are not appropriately con-
nected or are contradictory. As a result, authors give up and abandon their novels. To
overcome this problem, it is important to support authors in completing their novels.
A novel is a specific type of document. From the viewpoint of creating documents,
several researchers have focused on document creation by generating sentences from
given contents. For example, several studies tried to create fake scientific papers automati-
cally (Bartoli, De Lorenzo, Medvet, & Tarlao, 2016; Conner-Simons, 2015; Stribling, Krohn, &
Aguayo, 2005; Stuff, 2016). The main focus in creating documents such as scientific papers
is how to order the contents in a logical, and thus understandable, order. However, sen-
tences in novels are not necessarily strictly logical, so this approach is not appropriate
for writing novels. Liu et al. developed a system that generates new blog articles by com-
bining texts using a corpus extracted from existing blog articles (Liu, Lee, & Ding, 2012). In
addition, some studies have focused on generating novels in the style of a specific author
by accumulating many of the author’s sentences and then having a system learn patterns
from these sentences (Akimoto & Ogata, 2011; Sato, 2016). Furthermore, Hosaka et al.
introduced the Vladimir Propp theory, which defines character types and roles, and a pro-
totype structure of the Russian magic tale into a system as knowledge, and developed a
method to generate narratives based on this knowledge (Hosaka & Ogata, 2004). Bui et al.
developed a system that generates a narrative that includes new scenes and viewpoints
based on an inputted narrative by using evolutionary computation. This system divides
the given narrative into events and generates a new coherent narrative by combining
events using a genetic algorithm (Bui, Abbbass, & Bender, 2010). The systems developed
in these studies were intended to produce documents or novels rather than assist human
authors. In addition, their aim was to create documents or novels that are similar to exist-
ing ones. We assume that the difficulty of writing novels is creating an original concept;
simply combining information from existing novels does not lead to an original story. In
order to write novels featuring original stories, it is important to develop the authors’
ability.
Creating an original story requires sufficient creativity to induce ideas for the contents.
As idea-inducement support, Nakakoji, Yamamoto, and Ohira (1999) insisted that under-
standing differences of impression makes it possible to induce new ideas. They developed
a system for tagging artefacts by impression words and comparing them to others.
Kainuma, Miyashita, and Nishimoto (2006) developed a system that provides a virtual
space, like a scene in a novel created by the author, in which several users can write com-
ments. The idea of this system is to acquire hints for the characters’ conversations or beha-
viours that may occur in the scene. This approach requires collaborators, so it is not
suitable for an individual deriving ideas on his/her own. Moreover, it does not support
the user in organizing ideas to form a plot.
Watanabe et al. analysed the components of novels and developed a novel-writing
support system by having authors fill in the components (Watanabe & Arasawa, 2014).
However, in order to derive the components of novels, authors might have to consider
ideas that do not appear in the novel, for example, a message that an author wants to
flow through his/her novel. We must clarify what ideas the author should consider in deriv-
ing the components, even if they do not appear in the novel.
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 59

Our objective is to propose an effective method to support a novel’s creation, especially

for beginners. In order to achieve this objective, we need to answer the following research
questions: ‘What format of the plot is necessary for representing a novel?’ and ‘What kinds
of ideas does an author need to derive in creating the plot and what supports are effective
at inducing these ideas?’ Our research proposes one answer to these questions. Note that
this research does not establish a correct method for writing a novel; we simply propose
one supporting method for plot creation.
First, we propose a plot-construction model that represents the plot structure and
helpful ideas to consider in creating plots. This model consists of the plot, the story, the
message, the strategy, and the reader model. Among these, we focus solely on the
relationship between the plot and the story and, consequently, propose a support
method for constructing the plot by introducing the story. The story represents the
events that are ordered along the time sequence of the narrative world. However, the
order of events in a plot is not always identical to that in the story and intriguing plots
are sometimes created by changing the order of events from that in the narrative
world. Thus, having authors think about the sequence of events in their plot while observ-
ing the story’s events might help them create the plot. We then developed a system based
on this support method. Through an evaluation experiment, we verified the validity of the
structures of the plot and the story, and the effectiveness of the proposed support
method. The effectiveness of the other elements in the plot-construction model
remains an issue for our future work.
This paper is an improved and extended version of our previous work (Ashida & Kojiri,
2017). Specifically, we have extended our work to include new experiments, concrete
examples, and related works, and provide a deeper discussion based on the research
questions.
The rest of our paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we propose our plot-con-
struction model, which involves elements the author should consider in creating a plot.
We set forth the method for supporting authors in creating a plot in Section 3 and intro-
duce the developed system based on this method in Section 4. Section 5 presents the
experiments conducted to evaluate the support system. We provide our conclusions
and discuss future work in Section 6.

2. Plot-construction model
According to Hunter and Begoray (1990), authors construct a novel’s structure – the plot –
before writing sentences. This is the planning phase. If the plot’s contents are insufficiently
described, authors may have difficulty writing sentences that are consistent with the exist-
ing contents and thus give up completing their novels. Therefore, preparing a sufficient
plot is crucial to completing a novel. Since authors create plots using their own formats,
they have difficulty noticing a lack of content.
To support plot-creation, we must clarify the structure of the plot. The plot is the novel’s
framework and contains scenes as a hierarchical structure. The scenes in the first layer cor-
respond to the basic structure of the novel. Currently, we adopt ‘introduction, develop-
ment, turn (turning point), and conclusion’ as the basic structure in the model. Upper-
layer scenes include those of lower-layer scenes, which means the lower scenes contain
more detailed content. The most detailed scenes are called actions. When the planning
60 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

phase is completed, these actions are converted into sentences. Scenes and actions have
settings that describe the characters and the places where scenes occur. The settings of
upper-layer scenes are inherited by lower-layer scenes. In the lower scenes, additional set-
tings that are unique to them are also described. Within the same hierarchy, there is an
order of scenes. Thus, we define that the leftmost scene comes first in the novel and
the rightmost scene is last.
In order to support the creation of the plot, we define the kind of elements that authors
consider and their relationships, and form them as a plot-construction model (Figure 1). In
addition to the plot’s structure itself, the model consists of a message, a story, a strategy,
and a reader model.
In terms of telling things to people, novels are similar to presentations. The difference is
the method, such as by sentences or by slides. As Erren et al. insisted, it is important to
consider who is the audience and what to tell the audience in the presentation (Erren &
Bourne, 2007). Of course, the contents of the slides should be changed accordingly. Our
plot-construction model follows this affirmation. That is, the message corresponds to
‘what to tell,’ the reader model represents ‘who is the audience,’ and the strategy indicates
‘how to tell.’
On the other hand, Akimoto and Ogata (2011) described the existence of a time
sequence of events in the narrative world. They insisted that readers reconstruct the
time sequence of events in the narrative world when reading novels; therefore, authors
should be conscious of the time sequence of events when writing. The story in our
plot-construction model represents actions that occur along the time sequence of the nar-
rative world. Similar to the plot, a story consists of actions and scenes that summarize such
actions. Every action or scene also has its setting, but no element expresses the basic struc-
tural components of novels, such as introduction, development, turn, and conclusion.
There is naturally a correspondence between the actions in the plot and those in the
story, but not all of the actions in the story need to exist in the plot. Also, the order of
actions in the plot and that in the story are not necessarily identical. Differences in
order can be viewed as an interesting aspect of novels. The actions introduced into the
plot from the story are decided by the author’s strategies.

Figure 1. Plot-construction model.

 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 61

We used Little Red Riding Hood as an example that represents our plot-construction
model. This fairy tale was created for children, so its reader model is preschoolers. One of
its obvious messages is that evil people are ultimately punished. Figures 2–4 show the
story and the plot of this fairy tale’s first part; the girl is sent by her mother to visit her grand-
mother. Figure 2 shows the story of this part. In plots, authors can describe different actions
by changing viewpoints. Figure 3 shows a plot from the mother’s viewpoint and Figure 4
shows a plot from the girl’s viewpoint. According to these plots, the way of describing
the scenes differs according to the viewpoint. These scenes occur in the house of the
young girl and it can be inferred that the grandmother’s house is far from the girl’s
house. Thus, the setting establishes that the place is the young girl’s house, which is far
away from the grandmother’s house, and the characters are a young girl and her mother.

3. Plot-creation support
In order to support the creation of a sufficient plot, it might be effective to provide the plot
format for inputting the plot according to the defined plot structure. In addition, since the
plot-construction model represents the components to think about in creating the plot,
successful completion of the plot can be assisted by the derivation of five elements: the
plot itself, the story, the message, the reader model, and the strategy. Our aim is to
develop a support system for deriving these elements. The message, the reader model,
and the strategy are generally considered in the first stage and the story is addressed
while creating the plot details. Our current target is authors who are able to start conceiv-
ing plots, but cannot complete their novels. Such targets may face difficulties creating plot
details. Therefore, our current research supports plot creation by motivating authors to
consider the story. Support in developing the message, reader model, and strategy
remains as future work.
Some authors create plots with insufficient content and without awareness of the
story’s existence. Checking the plot from the sequence of events in the narrative world,
such as the story, may highlight such insufficiency. Authors can be supported by
defining the plot and the story format, and providing an environment for representing
them and associating them with each other. In other words, they may become aware of
content insufficiencies or conflicts. Therefore, we propose a system that represents the
plot and the story while associating their actions with each other.
Figure 5 shows the overall framework of our system, which includes an interface in
which the author can input a plot and a story and associate the two. It also contains
the author’s plot and story data.
This interface provides an environment in which authors can input plot and story
content. Since plots are represented as a hierarchical structure, they must also be
expressed with a tree structure in the interface. Plots consist of two types of nodes:

Figure 2. Example of story in Little Red Riding Hood.

62 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

Figure 3. Example of plot in Little Red Riding Hood from mother’s viewpoint.

actions and scenes. Both nodes have their own settings. The contents of the plot should be
created by discriminating these two types and the settings should be attached to both
types of contents. On the other hand, in stories, actions are arranged along a time
sequence. Being able to understand the actions in the story enables authors to check
the validity of their plots. Therefore, the interface provides an environment to insert
actions into the story and allows authors to relate actions in the plot with corresponding
actions in the story. By organizing the information with this interface, authors can create a
plot while considering the actions that occur in the narrative world.
Table 1 shows the form of the nodes in the plot. Name is the unique name of the node.
Type indicates the type of node, such as basic structure, scene, or action. Position represents
the position of the node in the tree structure. The position is represented by a hierarchical
level and a coordinate in the interface. Contents represent a detailed description of the node
and Setting indicates the setting’s information, such as place and existing characters, in
which scenes and actions occur. If the node type is an action, a corresponding story
action may exist, so Correspondence indicates the corresponding story action node.
Table 2 shows the form of nodes in the story. Here, Name, Contents, and Setting are the
same as those in the plot. A node does not have a Type because the story consists of only
action nodes.
Table 3 shows the form of the setting, which is attached to plot nodes and story nodes.
Name is the unique name of the setting. Type shows the type of contents, such as a char-
acter, a place, and other elements. Property contains attributes and values of the setting
type. For example, if the type of setting is a character, then name, year, weight, and so on
are candidate attributes. Several settings of different types are attached to the nodes in the
plot and the story.

4. Prototype system
We developed a prototype system to support plot creation. Representations of the story’s
time sequence and the plot’s hierarchical structure are implemented in vis.js (http://

Figure 4. Example of plot in Little Red Riding Hood from the girl’s viewpoint.
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 63

Figure 5. Overall framework of plot-creation support system.

visjs.org/), and the other functions are implemented in JavaScript and jQuery (https://
jquery.com/). The system is formed as a single-page web application. It operates only
on the client side, not on the server side.
The system’s interface consists of the key parts: plot, story, node-editing, and plot/story
linking (Figure 6). The plot part is for creating the plot’s hierarchical structure. The story
part is used for arranging the time sequence of the actions in the narrative world. In
the node-editing part, the contents of each plot and story node can be input and
edited. In addition, the file operations of saving and reading, FAQ functions, and tutorials
are prepared for each tab.
When the system is started, a root node and its child nodes, which correspond to the
novel’s basic structure (such as introduction, development, turn, and conclusion), are
shown in the plot part (Figure 7). Authors can create the plot using this system in two
ways. One is to create the plot structure directly in the plot part and use the story part
if they cannot develop sufficient ideas. By organizing already derived actions along the
time sequence, authors may notice conflicts of the existing actions or the lack of
actions. The other is to first consider the story in the story part and design the plot
from the story. In this case, the author can divide the tasks of deriving ideas and consider-
ing the order of actions. In order to support both methods, our system provides functions
for creating the plot and the story, and copying existing nodes in the plot or the story to
the other.
As a function for creating the plot, authors can add a new empty node by clicking on
the existing node to which the new node will be attached. The plot part in Figure 6 cor-
responds to a situation where the author has created the plot shown in Figure 3. The
nodes of the basic structure of the novel, scenes, and actions are discriminated by
colours. The nodes of the basic structure are depicted as yellow nodes, scenes as red,

Table 1. Form of plot nodes.

Title of information Description
Name Name of the node
Type The kind of node: basic structure, scene, or action
Position Position of the node in the plot
Contents Detailed contents of the node
Setting Setting of the node
Correspondence Information on a corresponding story action (action nodes only)
64 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

Table 2. Form of story nodes.

Title of information Description
Name Name of the story action
Time Timing of occurrence in the story action
Contents Detailed contents of the story action
Setting Setting of the story action

Table 3. Form of setting.

Title of information Description
Name Name of the setting
Type The kind of setting: character, place, or others
Property Attribute name and value making up the setting
Multiple for one setting

Figure 6. System interface.

 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 65

Figure 7. Initial state of the plot part.

and actions as green. Positions can be changed within the same hierarchy by dragging the
nodes and moving them in the horizontal direction. In addition, the plot tree can be
zoomed out or in by a mouse-wheeling operation.
The contents of each node are input and edited in the plot edit tab of the node-editing
part (Figure 8). When a node is selected in the plot part, the details of the scene or the
action and its setting are displayed in the plot edit tab. The setting of the parent node
is inherited by the child node; when creating a new node, the setting of its parent node
is set as its initial state. Figure 8 shows the content inputting for the node ‘I ask the girl
to visit her grandmother.’ Authors are led to consider name, type, content, and setting
in this tab. The position information of each node is determined by the node position

Figure 8. Plot edit tab in node-editing part.

66 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

in the hierarchical structure of the plot part. The selected plot nodes can also be removed
with the ‘delete node’ button in this tab. Authors cannot create, delete, move, or change
the nodes of the novel’s basic structure, such as introduction, development, turn, and
conclusion.
Actions in the story are expressed on a timeline that corresponds to the horizontal axis
in the story part in Figure 6. The timeline represents the time flow from left to right based
on the numbers on the axis. Since grasping the order of actions is more important than the
occurrence time of each action, the values on the time axis do not represent a concrete
year, day, or time. They are simply numbers on a scale that authors can use by freely inter-
preting them.
When the timeline is clicked, a new node is added to the clicked position. By clicking on
the created story node, the author can input and edit its contents. Contents are displayed
in the story edit tab of the node-editing part. The format of the story edit tab of the
node-editing part is the same as the plot edit tab of the node-editing part as shown in
Figure 8.
The function for copying existing nodes from the plot or story to the other is accom-
plished by the plot/story linking part in Figure 6. The detailed interface of the plot/story
linking part is illustrated in Figure 9. When a plot scene node and a story action node
are selected and when the ‘insert in the plot’ button is clicked, the selected story action
node is inserted into the plot as a child node of the selected scene (Figure 10). When
an action node in the plot is selected, the timeline bar is set, and the ‘insert in the
story’ button is pushed, the selected action node is introduced into the story (Figure
11). Since story actions may appear more than once in the plot, the actions of the
story and those of the plot have a many-to-one relationship. This relationship is
stored as correspondence information of the plot node explained in Section 3. To
make it easier for authors to grasp the relationship between the actions in plots and
stories, the corresponding actions in the plot or the story are highlighted by selecting
the action and clicking the ‘story/plot highlight’ button. If authors have created the
same nodes both in the plot and the story, they can indicate that both nodes represent
the same action by selecting both nodes and clicking ‘make story plot relationship’
button.

5. Evaluation
We conducted two experiments, the first to investigate the validity of our plot-construc-
tion model, especially the plot and story elements, and the other to evaluate the effective-
ness of the proposed system for plot creation.

Figure 9. Plot/story linking part.

 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 67

Figure 10. Example of inserting action in the plot from story action.

5.1. Experiment 1
5.1.1. Experimental setting
To verify whether the plot and the story in the proposed plot-construction model can con-
struct the plot and the story, participants were asked to create a plot and a story of existing
novels using the developed system. The participants were three undergraduate students.
The participants were instructed on how to use the system. After touching the system
and learning how to use it, they were given a novel printed on paper and asked to create
the plot and the story. We used the following two novels, assigning Novel 1 to one partici-
pant and Novel 2 to the other two participants.
Novel 1. ‘Deluxe Safe,’ a short story by Shinichi Hoshi

Novel 2. ‘Urashima Taro,’ an old Japanese fairy tale

During the creation of the plot and story, the participants were allowed to refer to the
printed novels. There was no time limitation, so participants were either able to create the
plot and the story or they gave up.
After the exercise, the participants were asked to answer a questionnaire, shown in
Table 4. Item I asked about the participants’ prior creative writing experience. Item II
asked whether the participants were able to identify the basic structure of the given
novel. Item III asked about the participants’ ability to discern the plot of the given novel
without the system. Item IV asked whether the participants were able to create the plot
and story of the given novel using the system.
Representation of the plot and the story differed for each participant, so we cannot define
the gold standard of the prepared novels. We considered the structures of the plot and the
story valid if the participants were able to represent the plot and story of the existing novels
using our system, the represented actions in the plot follow the order of the actions in the
novel, and those in the story follow the time sequence of the narrative world. If the partici-
pants gave up, or they could not represent the plot and the story of the existing novels cor-
rectly, the structures of the plot and the story were considered invalid.

Figure 11. Example of inserting story action from action in the plot.
68 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

Table 4. Questionnaire items.

Items Contents Choices
I Have you ever written a short story? (1) Yes, I have.
(2) I tried to write one once, but I could
not finish it.
(3) I thought about writing a short story.
(4) No.

II Could you locate the introduction, development, turn, and conclusion (1) Yes, I could find them easily.
from the given story? (2) Yes, I could find most of them.
(3) No, I could only find a few of them.
(4) No, I could not find them at all.

III Could you identify the plot and story before using the system? (1) Yes, I could.
If you found this difficult, please describe the difficult part. (2) I could identify them partially.
(3) I could only barely identify them.
(4) No, I could not identify them at all.

IV Could you create the plot and the story in the system? (1) Yes, I could create them easily.
(2) I could create them partially.
(3) I could only barely create them.
(4) No, I could not create them at all.

5.1.2. Results
We compared the created plots and stories with the given novels. For all participants, the
order of action nodes in the plot corresponded to the order in the novel. In addition, the
story action nodes were allocated along the occurrence order in the narrative world. Thus,
all participants were able to create the plot and story of the given novel. These results indi-
cate that we could provide one possible structure of the plot and of the story to represent
the novel.
Table 5 shows our questionnaire results. Participants A and B had experience in writing
short stories, while participant C had none. All participants replied that they were able to
locate the basic structure. Participants B and C were able to identify the plot before using
the system. Participant A, who could not identify the plot and story before using the
system, replied that ‘Before using the system, I could not identify the relations between
scenes and actions. However, by using the system, I could understand the relations and
creating the plot became easier.’ All participants replied that they could express the
plot by using the system. Therefore, these results indicate that the participants were
able to organize the plot and the story by using the structures of the plot and the story
in the plot-construction model.
Several opinions were obtained regarding the usability of the system. Most participants
requested an ‘undo function’ and a ‘multiple delete function.’ The ‘undo function’ returns
to the former situation and the ‘multiple delete function’ deletes several nodes at the same
time. Our current system allows users to delete only one node at a time. In order to help

Table 5. Questionnaire results.

Items
Participant I II III IV
A 1 2 4 1
B 1 1 2 1
C 4 2 2 2
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 69

users concentrate on creating plots and stories, the usability of the system is important.
Therefore, we should add these functions to improve usability.

5.2. Experiment 2
5.2.1. Experimental setting
We experimentally evaluated the effectiveness of our developed system for plot creation.
The objective of this experiment was to evaluate whether beginning authors could com-
plete plots using our system. Whether a plot is complete or not is subjective, so we eval-
uated whether the authors were able to complete the plots based on the questionnaire
responses, rather than the quality of the created plot. In addition, we did not evaluate
the effectiveness of our system for writing sentences.
For this experiment, we asked nine undergraduate/graduate students who were inter-
ested in writing short stories to create plots using our system. We first defined plot and
story and explained how to use our system. Next, we asked the participants to create
plots. Time was limited to one hour, but we allowed additional time if requested.
After creating a plot, participants filled out questionnaires with the items shown in
Table 6. Items I and II asked about the participants’ experience reading or writing
novels. Items III and IV asked about the effectiveness of our system for creating a plot,
and item V asked about the system’s overall usability.

5.2.2. Results
Table 7 shows the questionnaire results, indicating the number of participants who
selected each choice.
As illustrated in the table, six participants had never written novels and three had not
completed a novel they had started. Many participants read books daily. These results
suggest that our participants are beginners at writing novels, but do read them.

Table 6. Questionnaire items.

Item Contents Choices
I Have you ever written a novel? (1) Yes, I have.
(2) I tried to write one, but I couldn’t
finish it.
(3) I thought about writing a novel.
(4) No.

II Describe your book reading habits. (1) I read them daily.

(2) I read them if I have the time.
(3) I do not read them much.
(4) I do not read them at all.

III Were you able to smoothly create a plot? (1) Yes

If not, explain why. (2) No

IV Which part of the system was useful for plot-creation?(multiple answers (1) Story part
are allowed) (2) Plot part
(3) Plot/story linking part
(4) Node-editing part (setting)

V Was the system easy to use? (1) Yes

(2) No
70 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

Six participants smoothly created plots using the system. Two who failed to create a
plot responded that ‘The system did not give me new ideas.’ Another participant answered
that ‘I got some ideas for writing a novel, but I could not connect them well.’ Our system
does not support the creation of new ideas. Therefore, these three participants were not
the target users that our system assumes.
Seven participants replied that the plot part was helpful for creating plots. During the
experiment, five participants did not use the story part or, if they did use it, the orders of
the actions of the plot and the story were the same. One participant said, ‘I understood the
actions in the narrative world while making a plot without describing the story,’ while
another commented that ‘I did not have to use the story part because the sequence of
the plot’s actions is the same as those in the narrative world.’ On the other hand, four par-
ticipants used the story part and changed the orders of the plot and story actions. All of the
plots created by these participants were mysteries.
Seven participants gave the system’s usability high marks. Two participants complained
that ‘Understanding how to use the system was difficult because it had too many buttons’
and ‘Using the system was too complicated.’ We should improve the interface so as not to
disturb the authors. Appropriate interface design in human–computer interaction has
been studied (Bevan, 2001). Also, a usability evaluation method called the ‘Cognitive walk-
through’ has been proposed (Lewis, Polson, Wharton, & Rieman, 1990). In the future, we
should apply these studies and design an interface that authors can operate more
naturally.

5.3. Discussion
In the following sections, we discuss research questions based on our experimental results.

5.3.1. ‘What Format of the plot is necessary for representing a novel?’

In order to answer this question, we evaluated our experiments to determine whether the
participants were able to create plots using our system without any difficulties. If the
format is inappropriate, participants encounter difficulties in representing their ideas to
the plot of our system.
In experiment 1, participants were able to create a plot and a story for the given novels.
In experiment 2, participants with ideas were able to formulate plots using the system.
Also, many participants reported that the plot part was useful. These results demonstrate
that the structure of the plot given by our system sufficiently represents a novel’s structure.
In addition, one participant in experiment 1 commented that he understood the com-
ponents of the novels and that creating the plot became easier with the system. Thus,

Table 7. Questionnaire results.

Choices
Item 1 2 3 4
I 0 3 2 4
II 4 3 1 1
III 6 3
IV 1 7 2 1
V 7 2
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 71

showing the format of the plot itself helps some participants recognize the structure of the
novels and encourages them to derive the components of the novel.
In sum, although we did not compare this plot format with other formats, we believe
that we can provide a sufficient plot format to represent a novel.

5.3.2. ‘What kinds of ideas does an author need to derive in creating the plot and
what supports are effective at inducing these ideas?’
We view the story as a supporting element for developing a plot. In addition, functions for
creating the story and copying the action nodes of the story or the plot to other nodes are
developed for inducing both the story and the plot. If these ideas are correct, authors may
create plots smoothly using our system.
The questionnaire results for experiment 2 indicate that not many participants selected
the story part or the plot/story linking part as useful. Furthermore, five participants did
not use the story part at all. Therefore, the story is not a supporting element for all
participants.
We believe that the effectiveness of the story part varies based on genre. Five partici-
pants who did not create a story wrote a plot whose sequence of actions was the same as
the time sequence of the narrative world. Therefore, they did not need to consider the
time sequence of the narrative world. On the other hand, four participants wrote mys-
teries. In a mystery, facts without their causal actions are presented to readers in the
beginning and the causal actions that previously occurred are revealed later. How to
hide earlier actions depends on the style and strategy of the author. Therefore, the
story might be effective for creating a plot whose action sequences differ from the time
sequence of the narrative world. In the future, we need further experiment to verify this
assumption.
According to the response to questionnaire item III, the participants of experiment 2
may be unsuitable because they could not derive the novel’s basic idea. Our research
focuses on authors who have basic ideas, but cannot develop the details. Detail ideas
cannot be developed when the basic ideas do not exist. Therefore, in the future,
support for deriving new ideas should be proposed. In the study of idea derivation
support systems, several approaches have been proposed. Brainstorming is one method
for deriving divergent ideas by gathering lists of ideas from group members (Parnes &
Meadow, 1959); since this method requires a group, it is not appropriate for authors
who want to write novels on their own. Having the system prompt the authors with ques-
tions is another approach for spurring ideas (Le & Pinkwart, 2014) and is effective for indu-
cing ideas for individual authors. We therefore plan to introduce this question-based
approach into our system. We need to define appropriate questions for developing the
ideas of the novels and establish a system for creating the basic ideas, such as a
message in the plot-construction model, by answering the questions.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed a plot structure and a plot-construction model that represents
the necessary factors to consider in creating the plot of a novel. We also developed a plot-
creation support system in which a plot can be created by using the format of the plot and
the story in the plot-construction model. In the experiment, participants were able to
72 A. ASHIDA AND T. KOJIRI

replicate the plot and the story of existing novels. This demonstrates the validity of the
structures of the plot and the story and the effectiveness of providing a plot format. Fur-
thermore, the effectiveness of organizing actions in the narrative world as a story was
observed for specific genres, such as mysteries. However, the number of existing novels
and the number of participants in the experiment were small. We need further exper-
iments to evaluate the validity of the structures of the plot and the story and the effective-
ness of the system.
So far, we have only evaluated whether novice authors can create a plot using our
system. The quality of the created plots also needs to be evaluated, as well as the effec-
tiveness of the system for writing sentences.
In the current system, plots are created by assigning subordinate nodes under super-
ordinate nodes. This process corresponds to a top-down thinking process. Some
authors, however, may develop a plot from the actions. Our system does not support
such a bottom-up thinking process. To support this thinking process, we must improve
our system to create a plot from action nodes as well.
This research also proposes the plot-creation process as a plot-construction model. This
model was developed based on the concept of creating the presentation and that of
reading the novel, but the validity of this model is not yet proved. We need to investigate
the validity of this model, including messages, reader models, and strategies. If the model
proves to be valid, we need to develop the system for supporting the entire plot-creation
process. The message and reader model are often considered in the early stages of creat-
ing a plot. Therefore, we should introduce these parts in the system to further assist
authors in developing ideas for their novels.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported in part by a JSPS KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory
Research (16K12563).

Notes on contributors
Atsushi Ashida received a B.E. degree from Kansai University, Japan, in 2017. Since 2017, he has been
a graduate student at the Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Kansai University, Japan. His
current research interests include creative-thinking support systems, reading-skills acquisition
support, and human–computer interface. He is a member of JSiSE.
Tomoko Kojiri received B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Nagoya University, Japan, in 1998, 2000,
and 2003, respectively. In 2002, she was a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion
of Science and was a research associate at Nagoya University from 2003 to 2007. From 2007 to
2011, she was an assistant professor at Nagoya University and, since 2011, has been an associate pro-
fessor in the Faculty of Engineering Science, Kansai University, Japan. Her current research interests
include computer-supported collaborative learning, intelligent tutoring systems, meta-learning
support, and human–computer interface. She has received several awards, including Outstanding
Paper from the ICCE/ICCAI 2000, Best Paper of KES 2005, and Outstanding Poster Presentation of
ICCE 2007. She is a member of the APSCE, IEEE, IEICE, IPSJ, JSAI, JSET, JSiSE, and KES International.
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION AND TELECOMMUNICATION 73

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