# Scaling Long-Form Story Generation via Narrative State Tracking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35759 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.35759/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 63 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 63)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03442/) (2023)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12110/) (2025)
- [LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13076/) (2024)
- [MemoryBank: Enhancing Large Language Models with Long-Term Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10250/) (2023)
- [Zep: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Architecture for Agent Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.13956/) (2025)
- [LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15204/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Co-Writing Screenplays and Theatre Scripts with Language Models: An Evaluation by Industry Professionals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14958/) (2022)
- [LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07055/) (2024)
- [BooookScore: A systematic exploration of book-length summarization in the era of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00785/) (2023)
- [WritingBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Generative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05244/) (2025)
- [PlotMachines: Outline-Conditioned Generation with Dynamic Plot State Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14967/) (2020)
- [RecurrentGPT: Interactive Generation of (Arbitrarily) Long Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13304/) (2023)
- [Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11646/) (2022)
- [OpenMEVA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Open-ended Story Generation Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08920/) (2021)
- [Modeling Naive Psychology of Characters in Simple Commonsense Stories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06533/) (2018)
- [Agents' Room: Narrative Generation through Multi-step Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02603/) (2024)
- [LongGenBench: Benchmarking Long-Form Generation in Long Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02076/) (2024)
- [LitBench: A Benchmark and Dataset for Reliable Evaluation of Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00769/) (2025)
- [Do Language Models Enjoy Their Own Stories? Prompting Large Language Models for Automatic Story Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13769/) (2024)
- [Generating Long-form Story Using Dynamic Hierarchical Outlining with Memory-Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13575/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLMs have demonstrated strong capabilities in creative writing. However, scaling them to full-length novels remains challenging, as maintaining narrative consistency becomes increasingly difficult. Existing story-generation methods typically focus on stories of up to about ten thousand words, leaving their ability to scale to full-length novels underexplored. In this work, we introduce Narrative State Tracking Agent (NstAgent), a training-free agentic framework that allows LLMs to track a structured narrative state including characters, past events and future requirements. We extend an existing benchmark to compare narrative consistency across lengths, and use it together with a writing-quality benchmark to systematically evaluate stories ranging from 10K to 100K words. We show that NstAgent achieves better narrative consistency and writing quality as stories grow longer, and neither of them degrades noticeably as length increases, suggesting that it provides an effective approach to scaling story generation toward full-length novels.