Syemin Park, Soobin Park, and Youn-kyung Lim present Constella, an AI-based creativity support tool that uses social media-inspired interactions to help storywriters build interconnected character casts.
Our 7-8 day deployment study revealed a fascinating shift. Writers didn’t just focus on their heroes; they started caring more about ‘sidelined’ characters! Crucially, we found that the format mattered. Constella generates text in social media-inspired formats (e.g., diary entries) rather than final story text. This turned out to further encourage writers to write scenes themselves, while using the AI outputs as materials for creative interpretation.
Characters are essential building blocks of fictional stories. While the heart of the story may rest in one central character, its pulse comes to life through many. A well-constructed ensemble not only propels the plot but also creates emotional depth and thematic resonance by allowing characters to challenge, support, and transform one another. Thus, crafting an interwoven cast of characters is an important activity for all forms of storytelling—novels, plays, comics, films, and TV shows—but is especially crucial for full-length stories. This is because full-length works that are “the normal length, rather than being shorter than normal”, provide greater scope for developing the lives of their characters. While this process is expressed through terms such as character orchestration, interconnected web, and cast formation, we refer to it as interconnected character creation in this research.
Syemin Park, Soobin Park, and Youn-kyung Lim
