  Previous work has demonstrated the effectiveness of planning for story
generation exclusively in a monolingual setting focusing primarily on English.
We consider whether planning brings advantages to automatic story generation
across languages. We propose a new task of cross-lingual story generation with
planning and present a new dataset for this task. We conduct a comprehensive
study of different plans and generate stories in several languages, by
leveraging the creative and reasoning capabilities of large pre-trained
language models. Our results demonstrate that plans which structure stories
into three acts lead to more coherent and interesting narratives, while
allowing to explicitly control their content and structure.
