  This paper shows how to construct genre patterns, whose purpose is to guide
interactive story composition in a way that enforces thematic consistency. To
start the discussion we argue, based on previous seminal works, for the
existence of five fundamental genres, namely comedy, romance - in the sense of
epic plots, flourishing since the twelfth century -, tragedy, satire, and
mystery. To construct the patterns, a simple two-phase process is employed:
first retrieving examples that match our genre characterizations, and then
applying a form of most specific generalization to the groups of examples in
order to find their commonalities. In both phases, AI agents are instrumental,
with our PatternTeller prototype being called to operate the story composition
process, offering the opportunity to generate stories from a given premise of
the user, to be developed under the guidance of the chosen pattern and trying
to accommodate the user's suggestions along the composition stages.
