Automatic story generation aims to produce coherent, engaging, and contextually consistent narratives with minimal or no human involvement, thereby advancing research in computational creativity and applications in human language technologies. The emergence of large language models has progressed the task, enabling systems to generate multi-thousand-word stories under diverse constraints. Despite these advances, maintaining narrative coherence, character consistency, storyline diversity, and plot controllability in generating stories is still challenging. In this survey, we conduct a systematic review of research published over the past four years to examine the major trends and key limitations in story generation methods, model architectures, datasets, and evaluation methodologies. Based on this analysis of 57 included papers, we propose developing new evaluation metrics and creating more suitable datasets, together with ongoing improvement of narrative coherence and consistency, as well as their exploration in practical applications of story generation, as actions to support continued progress in automatic story generation.