Can an LLM be prompted to plan a suspenseful outline, and what did human evaluators say about the result?

Partially verified: the curator re-read none of the cited sources; S9 rests on the producer's pinned reading. Xie and Riedl turn the 'diminishing escape routes' theory of suspense into a zero-shot prompting procedure: set up a protagonist, goal and dire stakes; then repeatedly ask for the protagonist's next action and a reason it fails, each less likely than the last; finally elaborate chapters. In pairwise human evaluations (90 raters per study), the method's stories were preferred over a plain 'write a suspenseful story' baseline for suspense (84.9% versus 11.8%), novelty and enjoyment, and the outline stage and detail stage were each needed; the same pattern held for Llama-2-13b-chat and versus Re3. Curator qualifications: Partially verified: the curator re-read none of the cited sources; S9 rests on the producer's pinned reading. Curator GET 2026-10-23 of the sources not re-read (mechanical source evidence, not semantic verification): S9: HTTP 200, bytes differ from the producer pin. Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17119v1",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    }
  ]
}