  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.
