Story and writing

Story structure, screenplays, series bibles, characters, dialogue, narrative evaluation

• articleHow robust are open-access findings about readers tracking goals, and what can an agent check in a draft to make a character's goals inferable and their shifts visible?
  Open-access evidence available here is thin. A 2004 recognition-probe experiment (84 retained readers) shows goal restatement and replacement change goal accessibility; a 2019 CC BY picture-story study shows explicit goal shifts raise the odds of perceiving an event boundary (odds 3.53 times) and lengthen viewing time; a 2014 CC BY review confirms the Trabasso-style superordinate/subordinate goal hierarchy but says few studies vary goal structures. The core papers named in the question (Suh and Trabasso 1993; Lutz and Radvansky 1997; Magliano and Radvansky 2001) could not be read openly (paywall or 403), so robustness cannot be judged from replications. A draft check can be proposed: list goals, tag each as stated, inferable from action, or absent, and mark every goal shift and restatement; this check is the worker's synthesis.
• articleWhat failure modes does Archer name when characters do not drive the action (chance, passivity, unmotivated change of mind), and what scene-level check follows?
  Archer treats action that the characters' wills could have produced, but chance produces instead, as a construction error and a breach of 'the fundamental law' of the craft; he asks that the decisive scene be played between the characters whose interest carries the play (the 'obligatory scene'), and that a change of resolve have a motive other than elapsed time. He also warns that a famous character shown passive while others act disappoints the audience. These give four checkable failure modes for goal-less or protagonist-passive drafts. All derive from a single 1912 manual and its chosen examples.
• articleI am writing a scene: what does a public-domain craft manual mean by a character's will or desire, and what is the first check that every character in the scene wants something?
  Archer (1912) and Hamilton (1910) both put the character's will at the centre of dramatic writing, but they disagree on how much follows. Hamilton says stage characters must have active wills and the subject is a struggle of wills; Archer reports Brunetiere's will-versus-obstacle formula, rejects it as a definition of drama (wanting is not enough, conflict is not indispensable), yet keeps 'is there a sufficient obstacle between my characters and the realisation of their will?' as a practical planning question. For an agent the usable core is a two-part check per scene: what does each speaking character want, and what stands in the way. Both sources are English-language stage manuals of 1910-1912 and address the theatre, not prose or film.
• articleWhich fear measures do the open horror studies use (self-report, continuous ratings, skin conductance, startle EMG, fMRI) and what can each tell an agent about a script or cut?
  Inspected studies use: continuous per-moment fear ratings with fMRI and between-viewer synchrony (Hudson, N = 37 plus replication); skin conductance, ECG and nine-point retrospective ratings (Chun, N = 50); continuous expectation ratings plus retrospective startle/distress/tension/enjoyment ratings (Acosta and Sears, unreviewed); and focus-group discussion (Kershaw). The jump-scare paper says classic startle measures (heart rate, skin conductivity, facial EMG) have used probe tones, not film stingers. For an agent without participants, only the self-report scale design is reusable.
• articleHow can an agent grade a horror/thriller script or cut for fear-building and say which claims behind each check are measured versus craft lore?
  A usable audit has six checks, each tagged with an evidence grade from the inspected sources: anticipation phase present before a scare (measured fMRI and self-report, partly second-hand); obscurity without confusion (craft lore, plus indirect uncertainty experiment); sound cue use and whether it is a learned genre cue (qualitative); repeated-cue risk (measured for re-viewing, not for within-film repetition); darkness (lore); jump-scare physiology (not yet measured). This is a synthesis; no inspected source validates the audit itself.
• articleWhat is the difference between a jump scare and slow dread in horror, and what has actually been measured about each?
  A jump scare is a sudden image plus a loud sound (a startle); dread is sustained anticipation before a threat arrives. Open sources support a two-part structure: a measurable anticipation phase that raises later reaction, and an acute reaction at the scare. The strongest measured evidence is one fMRI study of feature-length horror films with self-rated fear; the jump-scare-specific physiology is described by its own authors as not yet studied.
• articleHow do early photoplay manuals teach carrying meaning in action and objects instead of words or titles, and what failure do they warn about?
  Silent-era manuals (Esenwein and Leeds 1913/1919; Zuver 1915) say a photoplay is told in pantomime, the less explanatory titles the better, and show a sample scenario in which an engagement ring touched in close-up conveys a man's sense of ownership. They warn that action which will not register in pantomime fails and that titles should have dramatic value. This is an object-and-action analogue of subtext for a medium without sound; its transfer to sound film is a judgment, not a measured result.
• articleWhat concrete techniques does Strindberg's own preface to Miss Julia give for dialogue that works indirectly (irregular exchanges, recurring themes, several causes), and what does he keep out?
  In his preface (Bjorkman translation, 1913) Strindberg describes dialogue in which minds engage 'haphazardly' and no topic is exhausted, with material planted early and 'worked over, picked up again' like a musical theme, and rejects characters who ask stupid questions to draw out witty answers. He also argues that an act has many deep-lying motives and that audiences pick the one they can master, so he gave Miss Julia many causes; and he uses pantomime and dumb show where speech would be unreal. These are first-person claims about his own play, not tested results.
• articleWhat is the 'second dialogue' under the spoken one, and does Maeterlinck give any technique for writing it?
  Maeterlinck (1896, trans. Sutro) argues that beside the necessary dialogue there is another, seemingly superfluous one that addresses the soul, and that its quality sets the quality of the work; he names Ibsen's The Master Builder as the drama where this 'second degree' dialogue is deepest. It is a theory and an appeal to reflect on real conversation, not a technique list: in the essay text read it gives no steps. Useful as a definition and a standard to check against; no evaluation is given.
• articleI have a character say something indirect ("It's really cold in here"): what do experiments say makes an audience read it as a request, and what makes them not?
  In a story-reading experiment, the same sentence ("Man, it's really cold in here") was read as a request far more often when the speaker could be inferred not to know about an obstacle (a broken heater) than when the speaker knew. Conventional forms ("Can you turn on the heater?") are described as easy; unconventional ones need inference about what the speaker knows. People differ widely in how much they use that knowledge. An fMRI study of spoken question-reply dialogues reports mentalising-network involvement for indirect replies. Limits: written second-person vignettes read by online participants, not film or drama dialogue.
• articleWhat failure modes of contextual NPC barks do designers and researchers report, and what (if any) tests do they describe?
  First-person writers and designers report four recurring failure modes: over-clever or multi-information barks, pools that cycle too fast so lines become memorable, context-aware bark sets that feel shoehorned (Splinter Cell: Conviction), and tooling built for imagined rather than actual writers. The sources are interviews, a community blog and a short academic paper; none describes a systematic test. The nearest checks are a journalist's manual count of repeated lines and Valve's recommendation to build in-engine debugging tools.
• articleWhat memory and anti-repetition structures do shipped contextual-dialog systems document (stored facts, expiry, chance, deplete-before-repeat), and how do they stop a line from repeating?
  In the Valve designer's own account, memory is just facts written back by a matched rule into a per-character (or world) store, with optional expiry; repetition is controlled by writers adding "already said" facts, expiry times, random-chance criteria, and splitting speeches into followups. The SDK 2013 code shows engine-level options (default visit-all-before-repeat in a response group, no-repeat, sequential, odds, speakonce, respeakdelay, matchonce). The speaker calls manual said-variables awkward; a Ubisoft writer separately frames repetition as depending on call frequency relative to pool size. No source here measures how well any of these prevents repetition.
• articleHow does a shipped game (Valve: Left 4 Dead, Portal, Dota) decide which contextual NPC line to play, in terms a newcomer can reproduce?
  The Valve designer-programmer who built the system describes it in his own GDC 2012 slides: when a character wants to speak, the game builds a flat dictionary of facts (the query), every rule in a writer-editable database is tested (a rule is a list of criteria that must all be true), the matching rules are scored by how many criteria they contain, and one of the top-scoring rules is chosen at random. General rules act as fall-backs for specific ones. The deck is a first-person talk, not a measured study; the Source SDK 2013 code confirms the same select-best-then-random-tie pattern in an earlier (Half-Life 2 lineage) version.
• articleHow do sound designers use point-of-view and off-screen sound to tell the story, with what concrete techniques, and where does it stop working?
  Thom's 2000 interview on What Lies Beneath is the densest account: POV sequences give sound its widest licence; keep dialogue sparse; use visual conditions (water, mist, darkness) as the door to subjective sound; filter real sounds (underwater muffle) rather than add many; keep ambiguity by making voices unintelligible; and do not call attention to the sound design. Rydstrom adds an unlocated-sound principle for horror, Weis a voice-before-image menace technique, Holman off-screen events written into scripts. These are practitioners' stated rules, not tested findings.
• articleHow do kamishibai makers design around the nuki (pull-out) reveal, and what transition and pacing rules do documented performers use that an animation or audio storyteller could borrow?
  A 2013 Japanese college bulletin on training childcare students to make kamishibai documents design consequences of the pull-out (nuki) mechanic: the cards are pulled from right to left as seen from the audience so figures walking forward must face left; the script goes on the back of the previous scene; margins hidden by the stage must be measured; students exploit pulling for stepwise reveals (a rainbow gaining one colour per scene) and for participatory riddles (a coloured paper interposed between silhouette cut-out and picture is pulled after the audience guesses). A US performance handout adds timing guidance (vary the pull speed: sudden cuts for surprise, dissolves for suspense) and cautions that overdoing character voices can steal focus from the art. No open source read names or describes specific sub-techniques of nuki.
• articleWhat is kamishibai (paper theatre), how are the cards written and handled, and what are the first things a new performer needs to do?
  Kamishibai is a Japanese picture-card storytelling form. A narrator shows a stack of illustrated cards (one picture per scene) in a small stage frame (butai) while reading text printed on the back of the cards. The scripts for each picture are on the back of the previous card, so the card the performer reads is not the one facing the audience; as each card is read it is slid out and moved to the back. Street kamishibai (gaito) flourished from the 1930s with about 2,500 performers in Tokyo in 1933; educational kamishibai grew alongside it. Practical guides here are Western educators' adaptations, not Japanese master accounts.
• articleHow does a professional rakugo performer say pauses (ma), first lines, word repetition and breath create understanding when there are no sets, costumes or narration?
  Katsura Utanosuke, a professional Kamigata rakugoka, explains in a 2011 talk (printed in a university repository) that rakugo has no scenery, costume or movement, so the audience must imagine 'what is not there'; the only means is speech technique. He defines ma as the blank time where no line is spoken and gives concrete rules illustrated on a short beginners' piece, 'Kuchinashi': set the tone with the first line, show two characters by contrasting pitch, vary repeated words to avoid boredom, pause before a keyword and hold the breath, pause again after a strange phrase so the audience absorbs it, and repeat an identical line but deliver it differently.
• articleWhat is a rakugo performance made of (makura, main story, ochi), and what does one seated performer with a fan and hand towel actually do in it?
  Rakugo is a seated solo comic or dramatic story performance in which one performer in kimono plays every character with only a folding fan (sensu) and a hand towel (tenugui). An official Agency for Cultural Affairs introduction and a 2019 speech-synthesis paper agree on the arc: an audience-warming makura (preliminary talk, often improvised), the main story (almost all character dialogue), then a closing line, the ochi (also called sage). The paper adds that Edo-style rakugo can also have an optional opening greeting (maeoki) and a conclusion (musubi) used instead of ochi in some stories. These are Edo/Tokyo-centred descriptions; the Kamigata (Osaka-Kyoto) tradition adds a desk and clapper (see -02).
• articleWhat simple stakes and suspense check can I run on an outline beat using what these models and experiments say?
  Combining the structural-affect precondition (a significant consequence for a character, then a resolution) with the escape-route accounts used by Dramatis, Suspenser and the Xie-Riedl prompts gives a five-question per-beat check: what is at stake, what outcome does the reader expect, what escape routes are visible, how likely does each seem, and what blocks them. The sources support the pieces; the checklist as a whole is a synthesis and has not been tested by these authors.
• articleWhat from oral-formulaic composition and documented Sunjata performances can transfer to improvised or procedurally generated storytelling by an agent, and what cannot be claimed?
  This is a synthesis, not a finding. From Lord's own statements: composition by a trained singer is remembering structured phrases and themes (not a fixed text) and is distinct from free improvisation; formula counts do not by themselves establish orality; comparison should be like with like. From the Sunjata sources read: versions vary around a relatively fixed core and some published texts are rewritten prose. An agent could use a bank of formulas and themes with variable slots to generate, but none of the sources read documents such use or measures its quality, and the Sunjata sources do not show composition-in-performance at text level. Transfer claims are hypotheses.
• articleWhat do "formula" and "theme" mean in Parry and Lord's oral-formulaic theory, and what did Lord himself say about the limits of formula counts?
  Lord (1986, in the first volume of the journal Oral Tradition) restates Parry's formula as a word group regularly used under the same metrical conditions for an essential idea, and uses "theme" for repeated passages. He describes oral composition as remembering structured phrases and lines, separates it from improvisation, and in retrospect calls the use of formula density as a test of orality too simplistic. Source is Lord's own review essay: a primary statement of his positions as of 1986, read via an Internet Archive snapshot of the journal PDF.
• articleHow does the Decameron frame (Rigg translation, vol. I) constrain and vary its tales, and what can an agent take for curated anthologies?
  In Rigg's English the Decameron frame uses a rotating ruler per day, a stated subject (free on Day 1, "unexpected felicity" on Day 2 per the passages read), advance preparation and one teller with a standing exemption who speaks last. The plague proem is justified as contrast. Observations come from the Day 1 introduction, the Day 1-2 transition and Rigg's introductory notes; the later days and the author's closing remarks were not read.
• articleHow do the Thousand and One Nights hold a listener across nights and nest tales inside tales, and what can an agent copy for serial or nested stories?
  In Burton's English the Nights use a fixed cut: the night ends mid-tale, the sister asks for the finish, and the king grants one more night. Tales nest several levels (Burton's contents show four for the Fisherman cycle) and inner tales are told by characters as arguments, sometimes opposed ones. The frame closes by consequence (children, release), not by the stories running out. These are observations from vol.1 and the conclusion in vol.10 only; the mid-volumes were not read.
• articleShould a comic reveal be a surprise or should the audience know first, according to period photoplay and playwriting manuals?
  Sargent's rule is to keep the spectator advised and the players in ignorance: in his Griggs-restaurant example the laugh broadens from the moment the audience knows he cannot pay, whereas a reveal at the end gives one short laugh; but he also says anticipation starts the laugh and surprise should complete it (small man beats big man). Esenwein and Leeds recommend ending a comic series on a surprise climax followed by a quick denouement. Archer (stage, 1912) warns it is worse than useless to awaken an expectation and then disappoint it. The sources therefore split: anticipation for sustained laughter, surprise as the topper.
• articleWhat are comedy, farce and slapstick, and what do early photoplay manuals say makes a comic scene fail?
  Esenwein and Leeds (Writing the Photoplay, ch. XVIII, 'The Treatment of Comedy') and Sargent (chs. LVI-LVII) agree on a ladder: comedy stays probable, farce exaggerates when the exaggeration earns added humor, slapstick extends farce. Both list failure modes: padding past the idea, a series of loosely linked incidents or chases, sympathy for the victim or serious consequences killing the laugh, comedy relief that arises from the director rather than the situation, and caricature of groups. Examples and period slurs are time-bound.
• articleWhat do 1916 photoplay manuals say about planting a fact, repeating a gag with a bigger result, and spacing escalation beats so each one lands?
  Sargent (Technique of the Photoplay, 3rd ed. 1916, chs. LVI-LVII) gives concrete rules: show a fact to the audience before you cash it in ('make a deposit before you can write checks'), let a repeated gag escalate (the dropped ice cream repeated after a cut-in leader reminds the audience whose coat it is), chain a slapstick beat into a bigger one (kick, thrown rock, rock hits a third person, both fall), and space beats by fractions of a second so the audience senses what is coming. His scene-writing rule is to describe comic business plainly and in action. These are one trade writer's period rules for silent one- and two-reel films, not tested results.
• articleIn plain terms, what does benign-violation theory predict for a joke or gag I am writing, and where does the open literature say the theory stops working?
  Open sources state the theory as: something is funny when it seems wrong (a violation) and also okay (benign). Use it as a checklist of two appraisals and of severity and distance, not as a proven rule: the open sources read here report that severity, social distance, power and culture shift what counts as benign, that some jokes with non-benign violations were still rated funny, and that no independent non-moral test was readable.
• articleWhere do Wilensky's 'story points' and Labov's evaluation/reportability disagree about what makes a story worth telling, and which agent checks follow from each?
  Wilensky's 1980 Berkeley memorandum treats a story's point as content: a spelled-out problem for a character (goal conflict, competition or lost subsumption) plus a solution component. He gives point prototypes but says his psychological predictions are untested. Labov defines the point as the most highly evaluated action and says interest has no absolute standard, so reportability is relative to the audience. The sources disagree on form versus content and on whether interest can be fixed independently of the audience. The Wilensky text read is the 1980 memorandum, not the 1983 BBS article, which was paywalled.
• articleHow do I decide what the story is about and where it should begin, and what does Labov's 'most reportable event' and backward causal chain imply for drafting and revising?
  Labov's later papers (1997, 2001, 2006) argue that a narrator first chooses the most reportable event e0, then walks backwards through efficient causes until reaching an ordinary event needing no explanation, which becomes the orientation. Because the more reportable an event, the less credible it is, each backward step also serves credibility. Labov states the chain is a necessary implication of his definitions rather than an observed process, and that reportability is relative to the audience. The sources concern serious personal narratives; applying them to fiction is a proposal.
• articleI need to tell or revise a short story: what are the parts of a Labov-style narrative (abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, coda) and what question does each part answer?
  Labov (author-hosted texts, 1997-2006) defines each part of a personal-experience narrative by the question a clause answers: orientation (who, when, where), complicating action (and then what happened), evaluation (so what), coda (return to the present). An evaluation section, rich in irrealis clauses, sits just before the most highly evaluated event, the 'point'. The original 1967 Labov-Waletzky paper was not openly readable, so the six-part list is taken from Labov's own later restatements. The scheme was built on spoken accounts of real events; use for fiction is a transfer the sources do not test.
• articleWhat did BioWare's David Gaider say about keeping the long-term Dragon Age lore in a master lore document, who could see it, and what problem forced it to be written?
  In an Oct 2024 Eurogamer interview, David Gaider says the overarching Dragon Age plot lived in his head until Inquisition, when other writers 'dragged' it out into a master lore doc that was hidden from most of the team. The journalist reports about 20 senior people had access. Gaider says the plan has 'more or less held up' in The Veilguard, which he did not work on. The source supports a practice of a restricted master document and a single-person-memory risk; it does not show how contradictions were checked.
• articleWhat do game writers say a lore or story bible contains and how should I keep one usable for a team?
  Two game narrative leads, as reported by Game Developer in 2019, describe a bible as a living document: Anna Megill (then Ubisoft Massive) opens with a 2-3 paragraph summary, then tentpoles, pillars and themes, key objects, major events and locations, plus tone, language, characters and storytelling methods; Tracey John (King) keeps a large lore bible with the localization team and says to document a lexicon and nomenclature up front. Leland Chee (Lucas Licensing) states that electronic records replaced printed bibles. These are journalist reports of talks, except Chee's own words.
• articleWhat do Ryan, Mateas and Wardrip-Fruin identify as the open problem of recognizing stories in simulation output ('story recognition', later 'story sifting'), what failure modes does Ryan catalogue, and what architecture does he propose?
  The 2015 paper by Ryan, Mateas and Wardrip-Fruin (paywalled; read here only through the author's quotations in his open 2018 dissertation) names 'story recognition': simulations produce a stew of events, humans can tell which sequences are storylike, but the system cannot. Ryan later renames it story sifting because stories are not already intact in chronicles, catalogues twelve 'pains' of emergent narrative (boringness, causality issues, no curation, poor presentation and others), and proposes a pipeline of chronicler, story sifter (pattern-based or heuristic), narrativizer. Ryan notes that in nearly all existing works the sifter is the human player. The dissertation reports no controlled evaluation of the pain taxonomy in the parts read; his own case studies were not read.
• articleWhat does Dwarf Fortress's creator say about generating stories from a simulation first, what mechanisms and principles does he report, and where does he say it falls short?
  Tarn Adams describes Dwarf Fortress as a world simulation whose history is a log of many autonomous agents; his stated method (2008) is to create actors with motivations and let them go, and (2019) to give dwarves autonomy so they are actors in their own stories while the player is the fortress's 'official will'. He is candid about limits: character motivations lag far behind stories, a recorded log needs post-processing to find highlights and can be boring without enough dynamics, numbers make poor stories (hence a body-part damage model), and the memorable stories come from forums and streamers, not from the game narrating them. His Game AI Pro chapter gives four simulation principles (iterate, break down the system, avoid overcomplication, use real-world analogs), but is about world generation, not narrative.
• articleWhy do players see stories in simple simulations, and what does a designer of a systemic game do so that simulated events become stories rather than noise?
  RimWorld's designer argues, in a 2013 first-person article, that a game's value lives in the mental model it projects into the player, so simulation detail the player cannot perceive is wasted. Stories come from apophenia (players read intent and emotion into simple events), so the simulation acts as co-author. He gives concrete design moves: borrow archetypes, put human-relevant values and uncertain outcomes at stake, imply primal emotions, model the minimum that supports the stories you want, add 'hair complexity' flavor that feeds nothing back, and track story-richness (the share of interactions that are interesting to the player). The article is a practitioner argument with examples and no measurements.
• articleWhat do RimWorld's designer and developer say about how its storytellers choose events, and what part of the mechanism is only documented by the community?
  Ludeon's own pages say RimWorld is a story generator that works by controlling random events, each one 'a card dealt into your story' by the AI storyteller; the designer's 2013 devlog names three storytellers whose policies are a pre-defined tension curve, pure randomness, and 'nothing bad happens'. The numeric mechanism (what inputs, what curve, what thresholds) is not given in any first-person text obtained; only the community wiki describes inputs such as colony wealth and time since the last major event, and a push/breathe cycle for Cassandra. No evaluation of the storytellers by the developer was found.
• articleHow do the Left 4 Dead and Warframe directors choose which events happen where and when (event selection), and what do they do to avoid repetition and wasted events?
  Both directors select events with constrained randomness. L4D layers independent population functions (wanderers, mobs on a randomized 90-180 s timer, specials on individual timers, bosses dealt from a shuffled Tank/Witch/Nothing deck with no immediate repeats), picks spawn areas relative to the team's route position (75% of mobs from behind), and lets designers place candidate items that the director then enables or not. Warframe weights enemy types, caps simultaneous rare units, spawns ahead of players and out of sight, and shapes density with a planned two-peak population graph because uniform density is 'dull'. Valve's stated rationale is replayability: static triggers get memorized. The only claim about stories is that combinations of rare randomized events make memorable stories.
• articleWhat checks could an agent apply to a draft episode ending, and which are supported by measurement versus craft advice?
  Synthesis only. From the sources read, an agent can run a checklist: (1) name the open question the ending leaves; (2) check it is a turn near the end of the act (Silberman, WGF); (3) check for a bridge into the next episode (Alias); (4) label any claim of retention as unmeasured; (5) note arousal side effects (Wirz). No source supplies a validated test of an ending; the checks are proposals.
• articleWhat counts as binge-watching in the research, and what do the studies actually measure?
  A 2020 open systematic review (28 articles, 2013-2020) reports no single definition of binge-watching: studies range from 1-3 to 3+ or more episodes in one sitting, and the review table lists mostly online surveys. The review separates an entertainment perspective from a negative-outcome perspective. It does not test cliffhangers, so it cannot support or refute claims about episode endings.
• articleHow do A, B and C stories share one episode and tie into act breaks, according to open guild and writer sources?
  The Writers Guild Foundation (2021) says six-act episodic dramas use A, B, C and sometimes D stories to fill the hour, and illustrates with a Grey's Anatomy episode where three interns carry the three stories under one theme, start at different acts, and intersect in Act 4. Silberman (2013) says the B story in TV is "almost certainly already rolling" by the end of Act 1. Both are analyst or writer descriptions of script structure, not measured findings.
• articleWhere do act breaks go relative to commercial breaks, and what do open practitioner sources say each act-out should do?
  In ad-supported formats, act breaks sit at commercial breaks and practitioners want each act to end on a turn that gives viewers a reason to stay: Silberman puts the false high plus one "bad guys close in" scene at the end of Act 2 and ends Act 3 one scene before the hero's plan; Levine, a sitcom writer-producer, describes the older single mid-episode "Hey, Mae!" break, and says networks added breaks for commerce, not storytelling; the WGF notes serialized shows end acts with act-outs. These are craft claims, not measured retention effects (see C3-B085-S20-06).
• articleHow is "resolution satisfaction" or narrative closure defined and measured in open sources, and what check can an agent run on whether an ending answers what the story raised?
  The one controlled experiment on closure found (Klauk, Köppe and Weskott, Diegesis 2016, IA snapshot) tested seven narratological accounts on 24 short texts and found two correlates: readers rated texts complete and said they had no further questions, equally for positive and negative endings and much less for delayed and open ones. That supports the "answered questions" account (Carroll 2007) and gives a two-item check, but only for three-sentence schematic texts. Other open work is thinner: a survey of 1,289 Neighbours fans used a new 7-item closure scale without manipulating the finale, and a generation paper had crowd workers pick the story with the better sense of closure. No source read tests whether a resolution caused by earlier events satisfies more than an uncaused one.
• articleHow could an agent check an ensemble outline for orphaned characters, unbalanced lines and unmotivated convergence, and what in the sources supports each check?
  No inspected source offers a validated checker, so this candidate is a synthesis: combine a scene-cast table with five checks. (1) Orphans: a declared character with no scene or no co-present character, plus cut vertices found by single-node removal (Moretti). (2) Balance: scene counts alone / pair / together by half (Thompson), compared with the intended hierarchy. (3) Neglect gaps: longest run of scenes without a line (Bost et al.), with an intent note because gaps can be deliberate. (4) Convergence: each meeting scene lists prior setup scenes per converging line and its kind (Bordwell). (5) Goals: each line has a goal and obstacle, and a structurally key connector has a stated motive (Thompson, Moretti). A stdlib script on an invented 16-scene fixture with injected defects flagged all four injected defect types (absent character, single-scene bridge, thin third line with a 12-scene gap, unprepared coincidence); that shows only that the script runs as written. Thresholds (2.0 rati...
• articleHow should intercut parallel storylines and temporarily neglected characters be represented in a character network over time?
  Bost et al. argue that whole-narrative aggregation and fixed time slices both mislead for TV plots where scenes alternate between parallel storylines; their narrative smoothing keeps a relationship in force while the characters are off screen and measures importance per scene. They show examples (a secondary character's subplot rising above the protagonist and ending at his death; Game of Thrones storylines in separate communities) but call their evaluation preliminary and qualitative. The method uses verbal interactions only, so silent presence (as in a Favourite scene where one lead stands mute) is not captured; this limit is the worker's synthesis.
• articleHow are character networks extracted from screenplays and novels, how accurate are the steps, and has the quality of extracted networks been evaluated?
  Extraction is a pipeline (identify characters, detect interactions, build the graph) and each step is assessed separately. For screenplays, Agarwal et al. tag every line (scene boundary, description, character, dialogue, metadata) and report macro-F1 0.96 for an ML ensemble vs 0.69 for a regex baseline on an unseen test set; networks from predicted tags correlate better with gold-tag networks. For novels, Elson et al. report attributing 57% of quotes with 96% accuracy (precision favoured over recall). The survey says few papers assess the extracted network itself, test data should be fiction, and filtering and static/dynamic choices change results. All numbers are the authors' reports on their data, not rerun.
• articleWhat do Moretti's Hamlet networks show about protagonist centrality, clustering, weak-tie connectors and node-removal experiments, and which parts transfer to checking an ensemble outline?
  Moretti builds speech-act networks of Hamlet and treats the protagonist as the node nearest all others (mean distance 1.45). Removing nodes is his experiment: without Hamlet the graph nearly splits into court and "beyond"; removing Horatio, though slightly less central by distance than Claudius, fragments the rest because he sits in a low-clustering region and links the Ghost/Fortinbras side to the court. Claudius sits in a dense cluster and his removal changes little. Moretti flags the limits (unweighted, undirected, hand drawn, a few plays) and hedges his Horatio reading. For ensemble outlines the transferable idea is a cut-vertex / removal test; whether it indicates a defect is a judgment, since Horatio is both structurally key and, in Moretti's words, without motivation.
• articleHow are goals, conflict and scenes distributed among co-protagonists, and how can balance be counted in an outline (scene counts versus screen time)?
  Thompson counts, for the three leads of The Favourite, scenes in which each appears alone, in pairs and all together, split into first and second half around the midpoint turning point. Totals (41/44/50) differ modestly while pair-scene counts with the queen are equal (13/13/11 together); she argues screen time is not the key factor and warns that presence is hard to measure and that casting biases perceived importance. Bordwell's Heat discussion shows another distribution: two protagonists who are each other's main antagonist. This is a single-film manual count with no reliability check.
• articleHow do network narratives tie separate lines together (accident, shared event, place, object, social tie, framing process, thematic parallel), and what do the sources say about coincidence?
  Across Bordwell's posts, lines of a network narrative are tied by (a) a shared event or accident, (b) a replayed event that becomes a convergence node, (c) a shared place presented as a "small world", (d) circulating objects, (e) social ties (kin, friends, acquaintances), (f) a large process or system used as frame, and, in Heat, (g) designed parallels. Chance is a recognised convention ("chance as hidden fate") that viewers can read; Bordwell notes audiences have learned to read criss-crossers, so directors innovate within conventions. The posts are festival and review writing, not a systematic study.
• articleWhat is a character network, and what can count as a link between two characters?
  A character network has characters as nodes and interactions as edges. The inspected sources use at least three edge rules: spoken exchange (Moretti, Elson), co-presence in a scene with dialogue (Agarwal/Weng), and broader co-occurrence; the Labatut-Bost survey lists five interaction definitions overall. Rules give different graphs (co-occurrence graphs are denser), and Moretti's own graphs were unweighted and undirected. For an outline, which rule to pick is a design choice; the sources do not name a best one.
• articleWhat is a network (multi-protagonist) narrative, and how does it differ from single-, parallel-, buddy- and "first among equals" plots?
  Bordwell defines a network narrative as several protagonists of roughly equal weight in intertwining plotlines whose lines usually affect one another, shown as a larger pattern. In Thompson's typology (restated on the same blog) multiple-protagonist plots split into shooting-gallery plots, network-of-relations plots and the harder abstract-idea-linked plots; parallel and triple-protagonist plots are separate cases, and crowded films often have a "first among equals". The sources are scholar blog posts about mostly US/European festival and Hollywood films; the full network-narrative essay (Poetics of Cinema ch. 7) was not openly readable.

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