# DOC: Improving Long Story Coherence With Detailed Outline Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10077 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10077/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 20 Dec 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

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- [Improving Pacing in Long-Form Story Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04459/) (2023)
- [OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09751/) (2025)
- [THOUGHTSCULPT: Reasoning with Intermediate Revision and Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05966/) (2024)
- [EvolvR: Self-Evolving Pairwise Reasoning for Story Evaluation to Enhance Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06046/) (2025)
- [CLEAR: Contrasting Textual Feedback with Experts and Amateurs for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07116/) (2025)
- [COIG-Writer: A High-Quality Dataset for Chinese Creative Writing with Thought Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14763/) (2025)
- [Implementing surrogate goals for safer bargaining in LLM-based agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04341/) (2026)
- [Shadow-Loom: Causal Reasoning over Graphical World Models of Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02475/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose the Detailed Outline Control (DOC) framework for improving long-range plot coherence when automatically generating several-thousand-word-long stories. DOC consists of two complementary components: a detailed outliner and a detailed controller. The detailed outliner creates a more detailed, hierarchically structured outline, shifting creative burden from the main drafting procedure to the planning stage. The detailed controller ensures the more detailed outline is still respected during generation by controlling story passages to align with outline details. In human evaluations of automatically generated stories, DOC substantially outperforms a strong Re3 baseline (Yang et al., 2022) on plot coherence (22.5% absolute gain), outline relevance (28.2%), and interestingness (20.7%). Humans also judged DOC to be much more controllable in an interactive generation setting.