MUSE: A Theory-Harnessed Story Engine for Vibe Narrativizing

arXiv:2609.15188v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLMs have been able to generate fluent prose, but high-quality stories also require coordinated decisions about plot, character, and language across planning, drafting, and revision. We formulate Vibe Narrativizing as turning natural-language writing requirements into a finished story. MUSE, a Theory-Harnessed Story Engine, addresses two bottlenecks: rule quality and sustained rule realization. Story theory supplies the rules, and a practical agent harness puts them to work. Knowledge engineering organizes Robert McKee's theory through rule atomization, semantic consolidation, mechanism abstraction, a single source of truth, and layered disclosure; typical examples clarify judgments that depend on context and aesthetic purpose. The harness preserves story decisions in intermediate deliverables across design, character performance, scene composition, and revision. Context engineering supplies each role with relevant guidance and decisions; a masterwork corpus provides inspiration and prose references. A worked example follows a requested object from its thematic role to climactic actions. Across four base models, MUSE improves WritingBench by 1.1 to 6.2 points over zero-shot generation; it is the only multi-stage system in our comparison to do so. It also raises LongStoryEval by more than ten points on three of the four models. ConStory-Bench consistency error density remains in the low single digits for all four models, below every reproduced story-system baseline on three of the four models. Ablations locate the largest quality contribution in structural design, voice-specific effects in the character path, and further gains in revision.