Tracery: Approachable Story Grammar Authoring for Casual Users

We present Tracery, an authoring tool for casual users to build grammars to generate interesting stories. While many modern story generation systems work to maintain narrative causality, generative systems like Racter show that non-causal and even nonsensical systems also have expressive power. Using design principles of direct manipulation and flow, Tracery is designed to allow users to author more stories with greater ease, and fully explore the affordances of grammar-based story generation. A small pilot test of users were able to quickly author engaging stories, and praised the system for its fun and usability.