Story Bible Template

What a story bible is for

A story bible is the reference document for everything that is true in your book or series. It exists to answer one kind of question: did she have a limp in book one? What is the name of the lane by the church? Which year does the war end? A long project makes these facts easy to lose, and readers notice when you do. Television writers use bibles to keep a room of writers consistent, and a novelist working alone needs one for the same reason, because the person who forgets is yourself two years from now.

What belongs in it

Put in what a reader would notice or a plot would depend on. That means the rules of your world, a timeline, a short entry for each main character, the invented words and names, and the physical details that recur, such as a scar, a squeaking gate or a clock that runs slow. Leave out what is only inspiration. A bible is not a collection of mood boards, and the shorter it is, the more often you will open it.

The continuity box is the one that pays for the whole sheet. Write a fact there the moment you put it on a page, and check it before you write the next scene that touches it.

Rules, style and open threads

Write down the rules of any magic, technology or custom as limits: what it cannot do, and what it costs. Those limits are what your plot will push against, and they are the first thing to drift. The style guide records the decisions you made once and should not remake: point of view, tense, British or American spelling, how dialect is spelled, how numbers are written. A good style guide takes ten lines.

Keep a list of open questions. Every mystery you raise and every promise you make is a debt, and a series reader will remember the ones you forget. When a thread is paid off, strike it through and note the book and chapter.

Keeping it alive

A bible that is not updated is worse than none, because it lies with confidence. Update it at the end of every writing session, even by one line. When you finish a draft, read it through once as a reader and check it against the bible. Where the draft and the bible disagree, decide which one wins, and change the other. If you share the project with an editor, a co-author or a translator, the bible is also the quickest way to bring them up to speed, and it spares you from answering the same questions again and again.