Generating Interesting Stories

The problem of generating interesting long-form text (whether fiction or non-fiction) is a problem of information density: people do not like to be told things they already know (or can guess), particularly at length, nor do they generally find the strain of interpreting content that’s too informationally-dense interesting for long. There’s a relatively narrow window of novelty that a piece of text must stay inside for most people to put up with it (and when we go outside that window, there are often motivations outside of interest: we may be daring ourselves to put up with a difficult text out of…