Story-bible concepts

Entities

The nouns of your world: characters, locations, plots, props and items, factions, and events. Each is a first-class record rather than a paragraph in a document, which is what allows them to be related, queried and placed on a timeline or a map.

Relationships

The edges between entities form a knowledge graph. A character belongs to a faction, holds an item, knows a secret, is present at an event, is related to another character. Continuity questions are graph questions, and the graph is what makes them answerable.

Continuity

Some things are harder to keep straight than others, and they get explicit support:

• Character arcs — how a person changes, and at which points
• Secrets and reveals — who knows what, from when, and where the reader finds out
• Item travel — where an object is at any point in the story
• World rules — the constraints your world runs on, and what follows from them

The three axes

A character’s life is authored along three axes at once, and separating them is the point:

Time — the chronology. What actually happened, in order.

Space — the geography. Where it happened, on a flat map, a globe, or a star map.

Presentation — the order in which the reader learns things. Deliberately distinct from time, because that separation is what makes an out-of-sequence reveal something you design rather than something you keep track of by hand.

Versions and alternate realities

A world can have versions. An alternate branch — a character who survived, a war that never started — can be explored without overwriting the canonical world, and the two can be compared.

Ingestion

Existing prose can be read and turned into entities, relationships and events. For an author with several finished books and no bible, this is the route in: the bible is reverse-engineered from the work rather than built from nothing.