Guides

How to keep track of characters and worldbuilding in a long novel

Somewhere around the middle of a first draft, most novelists hit the same wall. A character’s eyes were green in chapter three and brown in chapter nineteen. The journey that took two days now takes five. A minor character has two different surnames. None of these is hard to fix on its own, but each one pulls a reader out of the story, and finding them all in a 90,000-word manuscript is miserable work.

The tool writers use to prevent this is a story bible: a single reference that holds the facts of your book. Television writers’ rooms have used them for decades, and they work just as well for one person writing a novel. This guide covers what to put in one, how to keep it useful, and how not to let it swallow your writing time.

What a story bible is (and isn’t)

A story bible is a record of facts you have already decided, so you can check them instead of remembering them. It is not your outline, and it is not a place to write backstory for its own sake. The test for anything you put in it: will I need to look this up while writing or revising? If not, it can stay in your head or in a separate notes file.

The sections most novels need

• Characters. Name and any nicknames, age, appearance, where they live, what they want, what they’re hiding, how they speak, and the chapter they first appear in. Keep the physical details short and specific: “grey streak over left eyebrow” is more useful than a paragraph.
• Places. Every location that appears more than once: what it looks like, how far it is from the others, and who lives or works there. Distances and travel times cause more continuity errors than almost anything else.
• Timeline. The order of events, with dates or at least days, including things that happened before the book begins. Ages, seasons and pregnancies all depend on it.
• World rules. For fantasy and science fiction especially: how the magic or technology works, what it costs, and what it cannot do. Readers forgive almost anything except a rule broken to get the plot out of a corner.
• Terminology. Invented words, titles, place names and their spelling, plus any real-world jargon your characters use. This is where you settle “Lord Commander” versus “Lord-Commander” once.
• Plot threads. Each promise you make the reader, such as a mystery, a debt or a prophecy, and the chapter where it is set up and paid off.

Build it as you write, not before

It is tempting to spend weeks building a world before writing a word. Some writers love that, and for them it’s part of the fun. But if the goal is a finished book, the most reliable approach is to add facts to the bible the moment you invent them in the draft. Give a character a scar on page 40? Spend thirty seconds noting it. Over a whole draft those thirty seconds add up to a complete reference, built from what is actually on the page rather than what you once planned.

A useful habit is a short “bible pass” at the end of each writing session: skim what you wrote today and add any new names, places or rules. It takes five minutes and doubles as a reminder of where you left off.

Keep entries short and easy to find

• One entry per character, place or rule, with the name as the heading, so you can find it in seconds.
• Facts, not prose. Bullet points beat paragraphs when you are checking a detail mid-sentence.
• Note the chapter where each fact first appears. When something changes in revision, you know where to look.
• Mark undecided details as undecided, for example “age: 30s?”, rather than inventing them too early.

Use it when you revise

A story bible pays off most in revision. Before each revision pass, read the entries for the characters and places in the chapters you are working on. When you change a fact, such as moving the wedding from spring to autumn, update the bible first, then search the manuscript for every mention. A timeline is especially valuable here: lay out the events in order and the impossible gaps and overlaps become obvious.

If you work with an editor or beta readers, the bible also answers their questions. “How old is she here?” becomes a ten-second lookup instead of an evening of rereading.

Where to keep it

The best tool is the one you will actually open while writing. Some writers use a notebook, a spreadsheet with one tab per section, or a document with headings. The important things are that it is quick to search and lives close to the manuscript, because a bible you have to go looking for is a bible you stop updating.

Writing software can keep the two together. StoryForger, our writing studio for Windows and the browser, has a story bible built in, with characters, locations, plot points, world rules, terminology and a timeline kept with the book they belong to, next to a chapter editor and sticky-note planning boards. Whatever you use, keep a backup: a story bible represents months of decisions.

The short version

Write facts down the moment you invent them, keep each entry short, organise it so you can find anything in seconds, and read the relevant entries before you revise. A story bible won’t write the book for you, but it will stop the book contradicting itself.