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

Visual Story-Writing: Writing by Manipulating Visual Representations of Stories Damien Masson, Zixin Zhao, Fanny Chevalier UIST 2025: The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology Session: 3. Writing Text and Stories 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. DOI:: doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747758 Web:: https://programs.sigchi.org/uist/2025... Video presentations for UIST 2025 papers