Scaling Creative Writing Beyond Story-Centric Data with Attribute-Guided Genre Expansion

arXiv:2608.13947 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-08-14 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-08-14

Updated: 2026-10-13

Comments: CIKM 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: High-quality creative writing data for large language models (LLMs) remains dominated by story-centric data, limiting models' ability to follow the structural and functional conventions of diverse

Abstract

High-quality creative writing data for large language models (LLMs) remains dominated by story-centric data, limiting models' ability to follow the structural and functional conventions of diverse creative formats. We propose an attribute-guided genre expansion framework for scaling creative writing data beyond story generation. By separating thematic breadth from genre-form control, our framework leverages human-authored story prompts as diverse creative seeds, while utilizing manually curated genre attributes to enforce distinct structural, stylistic, and formatting conventions. We combine these to prompt strong LLMs for genre-faithful query-response pairs, which are then quality-filtered. Applying this framework, we construct the Multi-Genre Collection, a 50K-example corpus spanning 13 creative genres, including story, rap, lyrics, scripts, game design, character design, and other creative formats. Experiments across out-of-distribution writing benchmarks and held-out genre diagnostics demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our data consistently surpass not only base models and writing-specialized baselines, but also models trained on existing writing corpora. Genre-count ablations further indicate that controlled genre expansion, rather than story-centric scaling alone, is a key driver of robust creative writing capability.

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