What goes in a story bible
A story bible is not an archive of everything you have invented. It is the thing you check when you cannot remember what you decided, so its job is to answer questions faster than re-reading the draft. Everything that does not serve that is cost.
The minimum that earns its keep
For each entity that appears more than once:
People. Name and any variants, what they want, who they are connected to, and what they currently believe to be true. That last field does more work than the other three combined, because most continuity errors are a character knowing something they have not been told.
Places. Name, where it sits relative to two other places, and what happened there. Relative position matters more than absolute geography; readers notice that the journey north took six days and then a fortnight, and they do not notice that your map is not to scale.
Events. What happened, when in the world’s own chronology, and who was present. Keep this separate from your chapters. The moment you write a flashback, chapter order and story chronology stop matching, and a timeline welded to your table of contents becomes actively misleading.
Rules. Anything the reader will hold you to: how the magic costs, what the law permits, how long a message takes to travel. Write the constraint, not the lore. “Sending a message across the strait takes four days” is usable. “The Mariners’ Guild has a proud tradition of swift courier service” is not.
Three to five fields per entity. That is the whole schema.
What to leave out
Anything you have not used. A page of unused invention is a page you will maintain forever for nothing. Invent when the draft needs it.
Long descriptive prose. If you want to remember that a city smells of tar and citrus, that belongs in the draft. The bible holds facts you must not contradict, not texture you want to reuse.
Fields you added because they seemed thorough. A character template with twenty-five fields gets filled properly for the first four characters. Then it is abandoned, and a half-filled template is worse than no template, because you cannot tell whether a blank field means “unknown” or “never got round to it”.
The rule: add a field only when you have gone looking for it twice.
Mark what is settled
The most useful thing you can add is a status on each entry:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Settled | On the page in a finished draft. Changing it means a rewrite. |
| Provisional | Decided but not yet written. Free to change. |
| Abandoned | Considered and rejected. Kept so you do not re-invent it. |
That third status looks like clutter and is not. Without it you will have the same idea in month nine that you rejected in month two, and you will not remember why you rejected it.
This distinction is also what separates a story bible from a series bible. One writer on one book can hold “settled versus provisional” in their head. The moment a second person touches the world, whether a co-author, an editor or an adaptation team, that state has to be written down or it does not exist.
Where to keep it
The structural requirement is that entries link to each other. A person belongs to a place, a family and an era simultaneously, and folders cannot express that.
- Obsidian if you want plain files on your own disk and are willing to build the structure. Free for personal use.
- vvd or Kanka if you want typed entries and linking assembled already, both with free tiers you can test on real material.
- A folder of documents if you have under about fifty entries. Honestly fine, and a tool you never open is worth less than a folder you do.
There is a fuller comparison in the best software for organising fantasy novel lore.
The test
Pick a character who appears in chapters 4 and 19. In under a minute, answer: what is their name spelled exactly, who do they believe is dead, and where were they during the siege?
If that takes longer than a minute, the bible is not yet doing its job. If it takes longer than five, what you have is notes rather than a bible.
Frequently asked
When should I start a story bible?
When you first have to look something up. Starting one before you draft produces an invented reference nobody consults; starting one the third time you cannot remember a name produces a reference you actually use.
How long should a story bible be?
Shorter than you expect. One page per entity that recurs, three to five fields each. A bible that takes an hour a week to maintain gets abandoned during the weeks that matter most.
Should the story bible live in my writing app?
Keep it separate from the manuscript. The bible outlives any single draft, and coupling it to a document structure means a restructure takes the reference with it.
What is the difference between a story bible and a series bible?
Scope and audience. A story bible serves one book and one writer. A series bible has to survive being handed to a co-author, an editor or an adaptation team, which means it needs canon status marked on every entry as settled, provisional or abandoned.