About

Plural Paths publishes interactive stories where every choice is yours.

Short tales, a few minutes each, where you move through in the second person: you decide the next step, and several endings wait for you at the end of the path.

Here, identity spills past the boxes, and so does reading. You meet endearing characters, shot through with as much doubt as hope, looking for their place without being told which one to take. We don't name a culprit: we try to understand one another. The person you thought hostile often hides a fragility, or a simple ignorance waiting to be woken. And it is that nuance, rather than a moral, that makes the story.

We wanted a clear, free atmosphere: joyful, delicate, a little divergent. A way of telling everyday life. The kind we think is normal and often isn't, by handing the lead back to whoever is reading. Because a situation is better understood when you are allowed to choose how to move through it.

Welcome outside the boxes.

How the stories are made

The stories on Plural Paths are written with the help of artificial intelligence. We would rather say so, and tell what it means here.

People often picture an AI-assisted story as two lines of prompt. Behind each story there are hours of human work:

• An editorial line. The tone, the themes, what we want to pass on, and a writing charter of more than seven hundred lines: second person, present tense, close point of view, and one golden rule, "no choice is free, no choice is punished".
• Characters. Eleven people you meet from one story to the next, each with a history, a voice and silences of their own.
• The writing. It takes many forms. Some stories are entirely by Maia's hand. Most often, it all starts from a theme or a situation, and the text takes shape in a dialogue with the model, one question at a time: what is at stake, the possible paths, what each ending costs. Depending on the story, the model suggests an opening or offers a complete draft, which we take back, cut and rewrite until the voice rings true.
• The reviews. A full read-through, a checklist that hunts down the tics of machine writing, and a check of every path, so that every ending stays reachable.
• The adaptation. Each story exists in French and in English, with the same paths and the same endings.
• The illustrations. They are generated with ChatGPT, through many iterations and corrections, under Maia's art direction: cut paper, screen printing, a joyful and delicate atmosphere. They show imaginary people and places.

Every published story, whatever the way it was made, has been read and approved by a person.