# Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02428 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02428/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Oct 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14325/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [ReConcile: Round-Table Conference Improves Reasoning via Consensus among Diverse LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13007/) (2023)
- [Plan-And-Write: Towards Better Automatic Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.05701/) (2018)
- [Re3: Generating Longer Stories With Recursive Reprompting and Revision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06774/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18272/) (2024)
- [Strategies for Structuring Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01109/) (2019)
- [Trading Off Diversity and Quality in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10450/) (2020)
- [RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13304/) (2023)
- [Corex: Pushing the Boundaries of Complex Reasoning through Multi-Model Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00280/) (2023)
- [Story Realization: Expanding Plot Events into Sentences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03480/) (2019)
- [PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15527/) (2024)
- [Zero-shot Sonnet Generation with Discourse-level Planning and Aesthetics Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01821/) (2022)
- [Stylized Story Generation with Style-Guided Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08625/) (2021)
- [Improving Pacing in Long-Form Story Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04459/) (2023)
- [Improved Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00444/) (2023)
- [EIPE-text: Evaluation-Guided Iterative Plan Extraction for Long-Form Narrative Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08185/) (2023)
- [Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15079/) (2023)
- [LANCAR: Leveraging Language for Context-Aware Robot Locomotion in Unstructured Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00481/) (2023)
- [Outline to Story: Fine-grained Controllable Story Generation from Cascaded Events](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00822/) (2021)
- [Co-VQA : Answering by Interactive Sub Question Sequence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00879/) (2022)
- [StoryTrans: Non-Parallel Story Author-Style Transfer with Discourse Representations and Content Enhancing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.13423/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [A Cognitive Writing Perspective for Constrained Long-Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12568/) (2025)
- [Avoidance Decoding for Diverse Multi-Branch Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02170/) (2025)
- [Asking Again and Again: Exploring LLM Robustness to Repeated Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07923/) (2024)
- [Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15851/) (2026)
- [Plug-and-Play Dramaturge: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Iterative Narrative Script Refinement via Collaborative LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05188/) (2025)
- [Interrupting the Loop: Periodic Subject Changes Raise Judged Surprise and Connection in Base Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19893/) (2026)
- [GuessBench: Sensemaking Multimodal Creativity in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00814/) (2025)
- [Long Story Generation via Knowledge Graph and Literary Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03137/) (2025)
- [PREFINE: Personalized Story Generation via Simulated User Critics and User-Specific Rubric Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21721/) (2025)
- [AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18398/) (2026)
- [NARRA-Gym for Evaluating Interactive Narrative Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.08503/) (2026)
- [StoryLens: Preference-Aligned Story Rewriting via Context-Aware Narrative Enrichment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.28073/) (2026)
- [Codified Foreshadowing-Payoff Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07033/) (2026)
- [LLMs Should Incorporate Explicit Mechanisms for Human Empathy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10557/) (2026)
- [Constrained Semantic Decompression in LLMs through Persian Proverb-Conditioned Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12599/) (2026)
- [Controllable Narrative Rendering for Enhanced Assisted Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00009/) (2026)
- [Recipes for Creativity: Iterative Generation and Evaluation in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.07243/) (2026)
- [Are You Sure You're Sure? On the Impact of Instruction Tuning on Confidence and Lexical Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.13430/) (2026)
- [How LLMs Build Fictional Worlds: Setting and Narrative Space in AI-Generated Creative Storytelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02482/) (2026)
- [Generating Constructive Feedback on Stories via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.04824/) (2026)
- [Scaling Long-Form Story Generation via Narrative State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35759/) (2026)
- [Evaluating LLM Creativity through Long-Tail Performance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.12998/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generating a long story of several thousand words with narrative coherence using Large Language Models (LLMs) has been a challenging task. Previous research has addressed this challenge by proposing different frameworks that create a story plan and generate a long story based on that plan. However, these frameworks have been mainly focusing on maintaining narrative coherence in stories, often overlooking creativity in story planning and the expressiveness of the stories generated from those plans, which are desirable properties to captivate readers' interest. In this paper, we propose Collective Critics for Creative Story Generation framework (CritiCS), which is composed of plan refining stage (CrPlan) and story generation stage (CrText), to integrate a collective revision mechanism that promotes those properties into long-form story generation process. Specifically, in each stage, a group of LLM critics and one leader collaborate to incrementally refine drafts of plan and story throughout multiple rounds. Extensive human evaluation shows that the CritiCS can significantly enhance story creativity and reader engagement, while also maintaining narrative coherence. Furthermore, the design of the framework allows active participation from human writers in any role within the critique process, enabling interactive human-machine collaboration in story writing.