It's alright to elaborate, we have the floor anyway. Our conversation is
scratching an itch of mine -in fact, a couple of them all at once. You see,
for the first part of my life I figured I would most definitely grow up to
become a writer: I spent most of my time reading and writing. Things didn't
turn out as I expected. For one thing it was just not realistic expecting to
make a living out of writing what I really like to write (SF primarily but also Fantasy,
particularly horror) in my native language (Greek) and I didn't like
the idea of having to "sell out" to make ends meet. Also, I basically burned
out during my teens and got a writer's block that is pretty much still holding
today- I haven't managed to finish a story for years.

But- I got into computers and specialised in AI and I'm always thinking of
ways to use my new knowledge to do what you say: tell stories. I agree with
you that regardless of the medium, the story is what matters (although I'll
also say that what attracted me to writing was my love for words and language,
what I refer to as form: the written word as a purpose in and of itself. Most
of my knowledge in AI is in natural language processing, particularly tasks
like grammar induction and language generation).

So, one of the projects I've had in the back of my mind for a long time is
some kind of system, or (programming) language, to help writers author their
works. In particular, what I would really like to achieve is to create a
system with these two capabilities: a) given a story skeleton authored by a
human writer, the system should flesh out the skeleton producing a "rough
draft" that the writer could then edit further; b) the system should have
parameters giving the writer control of such things as theme, style and
"voice", so that by adjusting the parameters the writer could turn a horror story
to a romance ("Cthulhu and Shub-Niggurath, their love everlasting"... though
that would probably count as comedy) or, there you go- turn a
Fantasy story to an SF story.

Suffice to say that this capability is still light years away from our current
technology and probably also from our understanding of how a story works and
so I haven't really made much progress. One big problem for me is that it is
very hard to identify concrete and objective story elements that could
constitute the "bones" of a story-skeleton, with enough clarity that an
automated system could manipulate in the way I want.

It would not be enough to just describe such a set of elements in narrative language- one would need something like a formal grammar, some kind of structure that a computer could use. Some
might think that just training a neural network, or some other machine
learning algorithm would do the job, as if by magic, but what exactly would
one train a model on? If you just hand over a bunch of text to an automatic
learner it learns to reproduce the text. The structure language-learning algorithms learn is the structure of the language, not the structure of the story.

What one would really need is a big corpus of literary works annotated with
the kind of story elements you'd want your algorithm to learn- just as natural
language corpora are annotated with syntactic elements in order to allow
training language modelling algorithms. Such a literary annotated corpus of
course does not exist- and it would be extremely hard to create one, given
that, like I say, what constitutes a narrative element is very subjective and
there is probably little agreement on that even among people with your background in
dramatic and literary theory.

So I guess where I'm coming from is that I've tried, and failed, to
systematise story authoring, a failure that I attribute to the elusive nature
of narrative elements, and that may be partly why I tend to focus so much on
superficial elements, tropes, that can be much more easily represented.

Of course, I still think that there is value in tropes- because there is a difference in how
writers and publishers etc see literary works, and how the general public
does. I think sometimes people just want to read, or watch, a thrilling story
with spaceships or swords- and they don't really analyse the character's
traits, or the plot, very deeply as long as they feel pleased when they put
the book down, or exit the screening area.