Writing a Story Bible

by Joseph Lallo

Over my various posts about writing and podcast appearances, a theme has been forming. In short: things go more smoothly if you’ve got a good resource to reference when you get stuck. Want a smooth path forward? Have a good outline. Want a smooth book release? Have a launch strategy. Over my career I’ve produced books with and without each of these, but there’s one resource I always forget until it’s too late. So today, let’s discuss one of the most valuable and least common items in an author’s tool kit: The Story Bible.

The Gospel Fiction

So what exactly is a Story Bible? The answer varies from person to person and purpose to purpose, but broadly speaking it’s a compendium of all relevant data for your story. It’s a collection of character biographies, a world history, an atlas, and a plot outline all wrapped into one. Once a story grows too big for you to hold every minor detail which might matter to you or a reader in your memory at the same time, it’s probably a good idea to start producing a Story Bible.

Who is this for, exactly?

That’s actually a highly relevant question, and one that you’ll want to answer before you start formalizing your bible. As with any other aspect of an author’s output, there are three potential audiences for a Story Bible. Your readers, no doubt, would love to see it. Other authors and editors you work with can get a tremendous amount of value out of one. And let’s not forget the most important target for such a project: you!

Each of these target audiences has a different set of needs from such a resource. The good news is, those needs form something of a pyramid. Once you’ve built it up for one set of eyeballs, you can use that as the basis for the next level up. So let’s dig into the most basic form.

The Fan Wiki

We’ll get into whether you want to literally make it a wiki later, but for now, the point is that the base level bible is the one you might want to make available to fans. This particular form of the bible should have two primary focuses: what happened, and who did it happen to? Once they’re hooked on a setting, there’s a certain type of fan who wants to know everything about it. Your bible should strive to be the definitive resource for anything they might wonder about (that’s not meant to be a mystery).

Let’s start with characters.

This is the meat and potatoes for most of your fans, so if you’re going to put any effort at all into satisfying their thirst for knowledge, put it here.

Names

The bare minimum would be a list of characters by name. Include—and I cannot emphasize this enough—a name pronunciation key. This is more of a sci-fi/fantasy consideration, but trust me, if a name is even slightly off the beaten path, fans are going to want to know if they’re saying it right.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you have a character named Desmeres Lumineblade. If you don’t write [DEZ-muhr-ess/DEZ-meerz] next to it (or however you want it pronounced) you’re probably going to be answering a lot of emails about how to pronounce that name if the character gains a following. Bonus points if you actually record a video pronouncing the names.

Descriptions

Beyond the names, a basic description is a good thing to have. You don’t need to include the outfit—unless it’s fairly consistent and iconic—but height, build, hair color, eye color, distinguishing features will help people imagine the character. If you’re lucky, it might even get you a few more pieces of fan art.

You’ll want a bit of a personality description, and most likely a character history/bio. But this is where it starts to get tricky. The main differentiation between a fan bible and one a little further up the hierarchy is spoiler material. It’s entirely appropriate to include historical details that happened prior to the plot, but you may want to stay vague on information about the character that will be revealed by the stories themselves, or events that happen within the stories. Plenty of fan wikis include this, so you can be as detailed as you like, but this is the place where spoilers are most likely to be unwanted, so be mindful and label appropriately.

Relationships

Wrapping things up, some general interaction/relationship data is a handy resource. Family, friends, enemies, all of these can be defined here. Who do they like best and hate most? Rivalries and crushes. Trust me, fanfic authors will be thankful for the shortcut to some proper steam or angst.

The world is a character, too

Once you’ve got your cast of characters laid out, don’t forget to detail your world. If your setting is our own actual reality in modern times, you can give this a light touch. But a period piece, a speculative future, or a secondary world will all need some basic information to help people understand where things are happening and what makes this world different.

As with the characters, a list of place names and how to pronounce them is a good start. If you can mock up even a basic map to give an idea of distances and relative locations of major destinations, that’s the sort of thing that’ll be exceptionally well received. You can get biographical on the locations if you like, giving their history, descriptions, and defining traits. But while you’re handling the nuts and bolts, don’t forget to include cultural aspects.

We’ve discussed individuals, but what types of people live in your world. Are there unique religions? Unique occupations? Political groups? Are there any world events that are relevant? Wars? Recent or looming disasters? Are there language barriers? Popular sports or in-fiction works of fiction?

Going through the details above will not only allow your fans to build out the setting in their mind with details they might have missed, but it serves as a useful check for your own writing. If you find yourself with very little to add to this section, it might be a good idea to devote some time to world building.

The Style Guide

A style guide isn’t precisely the same thing as a story bible, but the kind of things that show up in a style guide are a good indicator of what you’ll want to start adding once you move to the next step of story bible, the one you’d share with co-authors or editors. This is the version of the bible that’s devoted not just to the body of work, but the nitty-gritty of producing it.

If you’ve done your diligence on the fan-level stuff, this will be a quick and easy addition. Essentially, the only difference here is plot and craft notes. You might want to go into a little more detail about how characters should be written. This would include mannerisms and quirks. You should also include some key aspects of how these characters would make decisions. What are their priorities and what drives them? Do they have a character arc? If so, what is it? And at what point or at what stage of the story do you want it to resolve or evolve?

Dive a little deeper

When it comes to the world, this level of bible will want to be just a tad deeper and a tad more prescriptive than the fan version. You won’t just be describing the regions of the world, but unique aspects of how people from those regions would be depicted.

Naming conventions are a good example. In my Book of Deacon series, characters from the kingdom of Tressor tend to have double vowels in their names, for example. If they have their own language, you’ll want to give some notes on how the region will flavor how the dialogue of native speakers is written. Do they have their own profanities? Their own sports? Their own customs and potential faux pas? Write that stuff down.

If one of your potential targets for this bible is a narrator for a book, you’re going to want to give very detailed pronunciation keys on not just names, but any word you’ve made up for the story. The same goes for any accents if you want them to be part of the performance.

Here’s a handy trick, though, if this part feels daunting. Because this isn’t intended for fiction readers, you can shortcut a lot of description by breaking the fourth wall. Drawing comparisons to real-life locations, actual people, or existing fiction can give an extremely thorough understanding of something in your story without very much effort at all. When handing over a story bible to a film-maker for adaptation, you might even go so far as to provide examples of what sort of an actor might play a role in order to paint the right picture in a producer’s head.

And then there’s you

The last potential audience for a Story Bible is you, and this is the version of the resource that is the most flexible. Naturally if you’ll be doing it for anyone else, you’ll have to include all of the stuff I’ve described anyway. But if you’re only making it for you, you can be much more efficient in the creation. Technically, you only need to include the details you think you might have to look up.

I’d advise you include all of the details you can, just in case, because you never know how much of a given story will fall out of your head. But the level of shorthand in this version of the story bible can be as pervasive as you like. My own notes of this sort have routinely said things to the effect of “Don’t forget to do that cool scene you thought of when listening to the sound track to Sherlock Holmes.”

You’ll also be including your notes on what you need to do next. Naturally that’s not something a co-author or editor would need, as it’s a self-assignment. It might even be something you want to keep secret from co-authors. (There are those among us who don’t want people to know how the sausage is made.)

You know the what, now you need the how

At this point, you’ve got a good idea of what you’ll be including and who you’ll be including it for, but there remains the question of how you’ll get this information and how you’ll present it once you have it. For the sake of spicing things up, let’s flip this on its head and work in the other direction. First, how do you do it for you.

The best answer, in my opinion, is to get this sort of information started before you’ve even begun writing. You don’t need every little detail, but building up your world and characters into a basic framework before plotting your story can provide a very firm foundation to construct your narrative.

Barring the pre-write, it’s a very good idea to pluck out the key character, setting, and plot points and jot them down as they occur to you or as you write them. This is useful in that by the time you’re done writing, you’ll already have the bible. It’s also something that even pantsers can do. Failing all of that, and I go into this more deeply in my blog on revisiting an old project, you’re going to have to re-read and keep notes as you go in order to construct the bible.

However you do it, once you’ve got the notes for yourself, you can formalize them for collaborators or fancy them up for your fans. Simple!

But where?

This is a fairly easy question to answer for the author and collaborator versions of the bible. You really only need a big, fat document—probably a word document for yourself and a PDF for collaborators. Obsidian, Evernote, and the like are also excellent options for keeping data. (I use something called Joplin, which is similar.) There are even those who keep all of this information right in their file if they write in Scrivener. But for the fans, you’ll need something a little more accessible and a little more public.

Earlier I mentioned a fan-wiki, and that’s absolutely a great way to present this info. There are loads of sites that will allow you to set up a wiki and start populating it. The great part about doing it this way is, once you’ve got the minimum viable product, fans might be able to lend a hand. Maybe this will just be by asking questions to help you learn what sort of details to include.

They might even eventually take the reins themselves and start filling out the wiki. If you’re going to go this direction, though, I’d recommend keeping a private document as well. Wishful thinking, willful malice, and assorted trollery can make for an unreliable resource if you don’t moderate well.

There is also a middle ground that can help you. I’ve used something called Zim. (In my case, specifically Zim Portable) to keep detailed Story Bibles. It’s sort of a desktop Wiki, allowing all of the cross-linking and formatting of a wiki, but in a shareable file. Really, the sky is the limit on this stuff. It just depends upon your tastes and needs.

Do it for your own sanity

Regardless of how deeply you dive into the details of your story, and who you’re preparing the details for, it’s absolutely worth giving it shot. There are few things more maddening than realizing there’s a key detail about your characters that you thought up on the spur of the moment six months ago and mentioned exactly once in passing, and now you need to get it right or create a plothole that could swallow your entire arc. A well-kept Story Bible will collapse your searches for such things from hours to seconds, and all while making the jobs of your collaborators easier and nurturing the enthusiasm of your fans.

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About Joseph

Joseph R. Lallo hails from Bayonne, NJ--the fabled birthplace of George R. R. Martin. He has written dozens of novels and novellas, including the international bestseller The Book of Deacon and the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series. In addition to writing, he has helped run the Six Figure Authors podcast with Lindsay Buroker and Andrea Pearson. Find Joseph and his books on his website at bookofdeacon.com.

Featured photo by Aaron Burden from Unsplash.