The idea in TAIL-SPIN (Meehan 1976; 1977) is that 'a story is about a problem and how it gets solved'.
The system works by 'by simulating a world, assigning goals to some characters and saying what happens when these goals interact with events in the simulated world'.
`The reader (the user) gets to supply much of the information about the initial state of the world, such as the choice of characters and the relationships between one character and another.'
Then the reader chooses the problem which the story is all about, out of a set of four problems. From then onwards, story generation is essentially a `report' of the problem-solver.