Nabokov's Cards: An AI Assisted Prewriting Systems to Support Bottom-Up Creative Writing

We introduce Nabokov's Cards, a creativity support tool that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to support prewriting. Inspired by the writing process of Vladimir Nabokov, Nabokov's Cards enables prewriting ideation by providing users with an interface to write idea fragments on notecards and combine them into new sentences or concepts using an LLM. We conducted a one-week user study of Nabokov's Cards with professional creative writers (n=13) to explore writers' prewriting processes and learn about their usage of Nabokov's cards. We found from our interviews that writers characterized prewriting as a long, amorphous process that involved observations of the real world and the accumulation of idea fragments and that Nabokov's Cards facilitated prewriting through nonlinear interactions, divergent thinking, play, improvisation, and reflection. Nabokov's Cards also encouraged innovative approaches among writers that surpassed the cliches and redundancy often found within AI generated text today. We also note how future AI co-writing systems may benefit from designs that facilitate prompt engineering and modular thinking.