Fictiones

Mock website
Export to popular fanfiction sites
Text editor

Inspiration

After hearing that AI fanfiction is a novel but obscured use case with Chatbots (from a talk about AI Fiction in the Wild by Melanie Walsh) I was inspired to create a product for the writers of the fanfiction community. Many writers have left platforms like Tumblr in favor of AO3 for fear that their ideas are going to be scraped for AI training models without their knowledge. Additionally, writers are using Google docs to draft posts and cross posting to both Tumblr and AO3, or other platforms like codesmos.ink. I wanted to solve this cross platform problem and address the rise of wuickly generated narrative content by fanfiction consumers.

What it does

This front-end platform behaves very similarly to a Google doc or any rich text editor. However, it has Zen mode (allows writers to write without seeing keyboard shortcuts, downloads, or other features when they're in the flow state). It also has inline margins for collaborative editing. Many fanfiction authors join another platform, Discord, to talk about ideas to brainstorm story ideas or tropes together, so this inline margin creates the feeling of collaboration among friends even when they're far away. Lastly, it stands out by allowing authors to copy to clipboard to download the document as a AO3 formatted export or Tumblr export, uniquely speaking to the disconnect of platfors writers have to face when they finish creating.

How we built it

I used Perplexity for researching desired features, and for coding, Claude Code, Cursor, and my own knowledge of React components to create it. It uses React+Vite, JS, HTML/CSS.

Challenges we ran into

I had trouble getting the formatting of inline margins to behave, and also to save my writing as a state. If I launched this, I would work in tandem with a front-end and back-end developer to ensure that document functionality that exists in Google docs (such as fluid commands mapped to keyboard shortcuts) would be possible.

Also, without Claude Code the ability to produce a prototype so quickly would not have been possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am glad I was able to use my foundational knowledge of React from my Front-end class and learn prompt engineering through Claude code to help me build out this application. Also, I think the problem space is novel, and I would genuinely like to build a tool like this with a Edward Tufte user interface for more documents.

What we learned

I learned that full-stack development is extremely difficult and that this would be more possible to build out with a team!

What's next for Fictiones

Doing user research with fanfiction writers to see if this is a real need or something that is desirable, since I made an assumption that most fanfiction authors would rather not use AI in their writing workflow. But that could not be the case. Also, finding a team to genuinely help me build this.