Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories

TL;DR

This paper introduces visual story-writing, a novel approach that uses visual representations of story elements to assist in writing and revising narratives, supported by a specialized text editor and user studies.

Contribution

It presents a new visual interface for story editing that links visualizations with text revisions, enhancing creativity and high-level planning in narrative writing.

Findings

Visualizations aid in story planning and revision.

Participants explored story variations creatively.

Visual support improves narrative coherence.

Abstract

We define "visual story-writing" as using visual representations of story elements to support writing and revising narrative texts. To demonstrate this approach, we developed a text editor that automatically visualizes a graph of entity interactions, movement between locations, and a timeline of story events. Interacting with these visualizations results in suggested text edits: for example, connecting two characters in the graph creates an interaction between them, moving an entity updates their described location, and rearranging events on the timeline reorganizes the narrative sequence. Through two user studies on narrative text editing and writing, we found that visuals supported participants in planning high-level revisions, tracking story elements, and exploring story variations in ways that encourage creativity. Broadly, our work lays the foundation for writing support, not just through words, but also visuals.