# Heteroglossia: In-Situ Story Ideation with the Crowd

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04519 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04519/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jan 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [ConvXAI: Delivering Heterogeneous AI Explanations via Conversations to Support Human-AI Scientific Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09770/) (2023)
- [How AI Ideas Affect the Creativity, Diversity, and Evolution of Human Ideas: Evidence From a Large, Dynamic Experiment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13481/) (2024)
- [Inspiration through Observation: Demonstrating the Influence of Automatically Generated Text on Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.04007/) (2021)
- [Authors' Values and Attitudes Towards AI-bridged Scalable Personalization of Creative Language Arts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00439/) (2024)
- [Collaborative Document Editing with Multiple Users and AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11826/) (2025)
- [Narrix: Remixing Narrative Strategies from Examples for Story Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07643/) (2026)
- [Semantic Frame Forecast](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05604/) (2021)
- [Conveying the Predicted Future to Users: A Case Study of Story Plot Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09122/) (2023)
- [CoCo Matrix: Taxonomy of Cognitive Contributions in Co-writing with Intelligent Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12438/) (2024)
- [TaleFrame: An Interactive Story Generation System with Fine-Grained Control and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02402/) (2025)
- [Narrative Keyframing for Generative Creative Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.10337/) (2026)
- [Designing Proactive Thought Partners for Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01588/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Ideation is essential for creative writing. Many authors struggle to come up with ideas throughout the writing process, yet modern writing tools fail to provide on-the-spot assistance for writers when they get stuck. This paper introduces Heteroglossia, an add-on for Google Docs that allows writers to elicit story ideas from the online crowd using their text editors. Writers can share snippets of their working drafts and ask the crowd to provide follow-up story ideas based on it. Heteroglossia employs a strategy called "role play", where each worker is assigned a fictional character in a story and asked to brainstorm plot ideas from that character's perspective. Our deployment with two experienced story writers shows that Heteroglossia is easy to use and can generate interesting ideas. Heteroglossia allows us to gain insight into how future technologies can be developed to support ideation in creative writing