What is a story bible?

A story bible is the reference document that records everything your story has established as true: who your characters are and what state they are in, where places sit, what the world's rules allow, what happened when, and who knows what. Writers also call it a series bible or a canon document. Whatever the name, it solves one problem: a long story accumulates more facts than anyone holds in their head.

The failure it prevents is familiar. Somewhere around chapter thirty, a character uses an item she gave away in chapter nine. A minor character's eye color changes. Two scenes place the same person in two cities on the same day. Every reader who notices is pulled out of the story, and serial writers have it hardest: web fiction is published as it is written, so there is no full-book revision pass to catch these before the audience does.

What goes in a story bible

The useful sections, in rough order of how often you will consult them:

• Characters: identity, appearance, personality, goals, abilities, weaknesses, and their current state: health, location, what they carry, what they know.
• Relationships: who is what to whom, and how that has changed over the story.
• Locations: places, how they connect, who lives there, what happened there.
• World rules: what your world allows and forbids, especially for magic and technology. Humans cannot teleport. The dead do not return. Whatever your story says.
• Timeline: events in the order they happened, not the order you told them.
• Items: anything that can be lost, destroyed, spent or given away.
• Factions and organizations: who exists, what they want, who they oppose.
• Secrets: what is hidden, who is hiding it, and who has learned it so far.

A book bible and a series bible differ mostly in scope: a series bible also tracks what earlier books fixed, because readers of book five remember book two.

Facts change, so keep the history

The mistake that quietly ruins most home-made bibles is overwriting. Your protagonist is healthy in chapter one, injured in chapter fifteen, healed by chapter twenty-two. If the bible only ever holds the current value, you lose the ability to answer the questions that matter when planning a scene: what was true at this point in the story? Was he already injured when he met her? What did she know at the time?

Record states with their chapter, and do not delete the previous state. The same applies to relationships (rival in chapter one can be ally by chapter seventy) and to knowledge (a character who learns a secret in chapter twelve behaves differently from the same character in chapter eight).

Record where each fact was established

A fact with a source is twice as useful as a fact without one. When your bible says the Dragon Sword was destroyed, note that it happened in chapter fourteen, scene four. Then a revision, a consistency check or a reader question becomes a lookup instead of an afternoon of searching. This is also what lets you double-check yourself: you can go back and read the actual passage to see what it really says.

How to keep it current

1. Start small. A protagonist, her goal, two or three key relationships, the main location, and the rules that the plot depends on. A thin bible you actually maintain beats a complete one you abandon in week two.
2. Update at the chapter boundary. After finishing a chapter, while the changes are fresh, record what changed: injuries, new knowledge, moved items, relationship shifts.
3. Review before you write. Before a scene, skim the entries for the characters and places in it. This is where the bible pays for itself.
4. Prefer records over prose. A table of dated states is faster to consult than three paragraphs of biography.
5. Revisit at revision. Prune entries that never mattered, and mark contradictions you decided to keep on purpose, so future-you does not "fix" a deliberate mystery.

The failure modes

• The shelf bible: written in a burst of enthusiasm before chapter one, never opened again. It describes the book you planned, not the book you wrote.
• The overwritten bible: holds only the present, so it cannot answer anything about the past.
• The brain-dump: everything is in there, but nothing is findable, so checking a fact takes longer than inventing a new one.

A story bible is not an outline. An outline plans what happens next; the bible records what has already happened. You need both, and only one of them can be reconstructed from the manuscript.

How Kanonara approaches this

Kanonara is built around exactly this record. Characters, relationships, places, world rules, timeline, items and secrets are structured records with their history, and when you analyze a chapter, proposed additions arrive with the passages they came from. You approve or reject each one, and only what you approve joins the canon. See how Kanonara works.