Text editing is powerful, but entering text is often not the most natural way to construct certain types of expressions, such as those encoding colors, animations, musical sequences, tabular data, plots, widgets, graphs, and various other data structures. We introduce live literals, or livelits, which allow the programmer to fill holes of such types by directly manipulating a graphical user interface. Livelits are compositional: this GUI can itself contain typed holes that the programmer can fill with expressions that might contain other livelits. Livelits are also live: they can provide immediate feedback about the dynamic implications of the programmer’s choices, even when the subexpressions mention bound variables, because the livelit is given access to closures associated with the hole that the livelit is tasked with filling. We are implementing livelits within Hazel, a live functional programming environment that assigns meaning to every edit state.