Story generation can best be viewed as a planning task. We show here UNIVERSE, a program that generates melodrama plot outlines using hierarchical planning methods. Examples are given of the program creating story outlines using a set of characters that it also created. Weindicate that story telling is open-ended, does not have to be perfect, and evaluation criteria are unclear, and contrast the sort of planning needed for story telling with other planning tasks. We suggest that certain elements of the methods used by UNIVERSE could be usefully applied toother tasks.

The generation of extended plots for melodramatic fiction is an interesting Artificial Intelligence task --- one that requires the application of generalization techniques to carry out fully, UNIVERSE is a story-telling program that uses plan-like units, "plot fragments" to generate plot outlines. By using a rich library of plot fragments and a well-developed set of characters, UNIVERSE can create a wide range of plot outlines. In this paperm we illustrate how UNIVERSE's plot fragment library might be automatically extended using explanation-based generalization methods. Our methods are based on analysis of a televeision melodrama