TombWriter: Scaffolding Story Archeology through Beat-Level Interaction in Human-AI Co-Writing

TL;DR

TombWriter introduces a hierarchical, beat-level approach to AI-assisted story co-writing, enhancing writer agency and structural discovery through a visual, iterative pipeline that separates story structure from prose style.

Contribution

This work presents the novel concept of story archeology, a beat-level co-writing system, and a visual tool that supports structural control and iterative refinement in AI-assisted storytelling.

Findings

Writers see AI as a generation tool, not a collaborator.

Participants valued structural discovery over prose generation.

The system supports ownership but may affect voice perception.

Abstract

The dominant paradigm for LLM interaction in AI co-writing uses disposable prompts that vanish after use. This may lead to imprecise results, cumbersome workflows, and diminished author agency and ownership. We propose LLM-based story archeology, where prompts serve as a hierarchical story instrument refined over time to extract the writer's intended story. Drawing on the fossil theory of story- telling, where stories exist as latent structures that writers excavate through their craft, this approach supports agency and ownership through high involvement and control. Writers work at the level of story beats rather than prose. They generate character actions in scenes to discover emergent possibilities, simulated by the LLM or directly nudged, then edit resulting beats to refine scenes iteratively. Prose is generated from beats based on style and genre, separating structure from style. We developed TombWriter, a web-based tool that visualizes stories as navigable cards -- characters, scenes, and beats -- through a five-stage narrative pipeline. We conducted a qual- itative study with five experienced writers who used the system over three days. Through semi-structured interviews, we found that writers framed AI as a generation engine rather than collabo- rator, claimed ownership while reporting voice loss, and valued the system for structural discovery rather than prose production. We contribute the story archeology approach, the TombWriter system, and qualitative findings on beat-level human-AI co-writing.