A challenge that can arise when you’re writing is keeping coherent track of where everything’s at in your book or series. This is especially relevant when you’ve introduced a whole host of deep, solidly-built characters, and their own idiosyncrasies are actually relevant to the story. Not to mention appearances, mannerisms, alliances, temperament, ancestors, height, star sign, and a whole host of minutiae that can become complex to keep track of.

It might not matter to you if your characters’ eyes have changed colour part-way through the book. You might have only mentioned his hazel peepers because it fit with the flow of the sentence. Trust me, though, someone’s going to pick up on it if they’re ocean-blue a few hundred pages later.

This issue of internal consistency, of keeping track of the plethora of information about your characters, setting, and world becomes harder the more epic in scope your writing is. God only knows how G.R.R. Martin manages it!

Well, I can provide a little hint. As Nathan Bransford so ably pointed out on his blog recently, creating a Writing Bible is a fantastic way of keeping track of what’s happening in your story.

Write Your Own Bible
A ‘Writing Bible’ in this context is simply a document that keeps track of everything that deserves it in your story. It’s a phrase used commonly by creative staff working on things like TV shows and movies with a long creation time. It’s the writing equivalent of keeping Polaroids of actors in between takes in shooting a movie to make sure their make-up is consistent.

Your Writing Bible can have as much or as little information in it as you’d like. You don’t need to exhaustively cross-reference everything you write about. That would take an inordinate amount of time, and for most writing, it’s simply not going to be necessary. Some information covering the basics – the vital signs, if you will – of your story will get you pointed in the right direction.

Once you start using a Bible system, then there’s a good chance you’ll fall in love it. It will start to grow, protrude in odd little bulges of colour and information. As with any tool, your use of the reference materials you create will probably be minimal at first, and then get increasingly complex and sophisticated as you develop your material.

Manual vs Electronic Bibles
This is a false dichotomy. It’s actually great to have both a printed version of your Writing Bible and an electronic version open as you write. You’ll find they both serve different purposes.

I use my written Bible for browsing through when I’m relaxing, scribbling ideas in when they come to me at odd hours (the toilet and 3a.m. Are common times) and having something doesn’t live on a screen to read. Once or twice a week, I’ll take my jottings from the printed version and implement them in the electronic record.

I can’t recommend keeping only a manual reference system. For a start, it’s likely to get messy and sprawly, quickly. It’s also going to be harder to organise, even if you use something like index cards. It’s also going to be a challenge to refer to things quickly in it, and you can forget about creating a functional index.

For these reasons, it’s best to have at least one electronic version of your Writing Bible. It doesn’t have to be the one you refer to the most. Having it will let you quickly make edits, rearrange the document, and provide a host of referencing options that manual systems simply can’t compete with.

I suggest keeping your electronic copy open in the background if you’re writing. A great way of adding to your Writing Bible is to copy-and-paste things as you go. This stops you from having to mentally track what needs to go into your Bible.

Go easy on yourself. Don’t interrupt the flow of a deep writing session by getting frantic about collating everything perfectly in your Bible. Perhaps at the end of a session, or as a wind-down, scroll back through what you’ve created and pick out some choice material to update your reference sources with. You’ll be glad you did.

The Process
This is the best time to get friendly with your word processor. Now, for choice, I use OpenOffice, but this is going to work exactly the same with other word processors. The language might be a little different, but all the typey-do-thingers that collect your words with any semblance of sophistication have both Indexing and Table of Contents functions. I promise.

And that’s what we’re going to explore right now, ladies and gentlemen.

Table of Contents
Mmm. Organisation.

Why a Table of Contents? Because it makes finding what you’ve written easier. Your headings, sub-headings and groupings will be handily laid out in the document. You can use the ToC to jump around your Writing Bible as you need, referring to notes left earlier and updating as necessary.

What’s cool about doing this electronically is that word processors are smart enough to manually update your ToC’s when you adjust them.

I’m going to highlight that again. All the tedious paperwork is taken care of for you.

In most programs, the way this magic works boils down to one simple word: headings.

Open up a new document. Go on, I dare you.
Look! Up there, on the left, near the ‘font’ bar. See where it’s saying something like ‘default’, or ‘body text’? Great. That’s a box we’re going to get familiar with.

In this box, we have the capacity to ascribe certain values to the text we’re using. The ones we’ll use will be the various level of ‘Headings’ – Heading 1, 2, and 3 will probably give you the depth you need.

What I’d encourage you to spend some time playing with now is the settings for each of those headings. You can set a ‘style’ that will remember how big you want each of your heading sizes to be, what font, whether they’re bold, centre-aligned, etc.

Create a couple of pages in your Writing Bible now. Do some samples, don’t worry too much about content. In fact, you can be entirely content-less if you want. Try ascribing some headings of different levels.

Logically, it’s going to make the most sense if you use the different levels of headings to ‘drill down’ into your subjects. Like breadcrumbs in an Internet browser, you will find your layout probably organises itself that it wants to use this structure anyway. So you might end up with one potential sset of levels going Plot > Opening Scenes > Introductions > Bad Guy Introduction. Or Characters > Major character > Heroine > Physical attributes > Tattoos.

This is where the magic kicks in. Now you’ve made a few different pages, head up to the front page of your Writing Bible and go (something like) Insert – Indexes and Tables – Table of Contents. You’ll probably have a few settings to play around with. Then, BLAMMO! Your ToC will spring into being.

Have a play. Have a fiddle. Notice how the ToC expands and contracts to cover the changes you make to your Writing Bible. Cut a section out? No worries. Expand it dramatically? It handles all that for you.

You can even set your ToC to act as internal hyperlinks, to save you scrolling tediously through pages, trying to find the section that you want. It may take a little bit of fiddling in the Options menus, but I promise it’s worth it.

You’ll find that having a ToC is, essentially, the reason to make yourself a Writing Bible. Organisation, especially in an endeavour as vital as story-writing, pays infinite dividends in terms of time, consistency, and authority. Use your ToC to rapidly and accurately collect and categorise information in your Bible to help you in the future.

Now, what if you want to see the ever-growing web of relationships between elements of your story?

Indexes
An index serves many of the same functions as a ToC. You insert it into your document in much the same way – traditionally at the end, but wherever suits you best.

Once you have an Index, you need to tell your document what the key words are. The simplest way to do this is to browse through your Writing bible once or twice, highlighting and adding the words to the Index as you go.

A hint: Choose the option that means you only need to add a word of interest once. This means that whenever you come across a new topic of interest – let’s say, ‘corpses’ – then you find one instance of the word, add it to your index, and then can easily find all your other necro-affiliated references without resorting to manual porings-over.

What do you want to add to an Index? Anything that catches your fancy. The more comprehensive you are as you build, the more complete your references will be once you’ve finished. At the start, your index will probably be as sparse as your ToC. Once your Writing Bible expands to a few dozen pages, though, you’ll be glad you’ve indexed.

So What Goes Into Your Writing Bible?
I’m glad you asked.
Here are some suggestions.

Contents
This is a fairly obvious start, and a great place to put your Table of Contents. If you print out editions of your Writing Bible – and that’s a great plan, letting you annotate in free hand as you go – then the ToC needs to be easily accessible so you can flick to the right spot easily.

Major Characters
There is no hard and fast definition of what constitutes a major character. Satisfy yourself. I put my protagonists here, the main antagonists, anyone who’s going to appear regularly through the book, and anyone else who is cool enough that I’ve thought up a funky backstory I’m going to want to expand on at some point…

The majorest of major characters (Grammar Nazis Go Home!) get their own subheadings – appearance, background, religious views, relationships with other major characters.

I suggest trying to balance out a combination of facts and observations about your characters. Facts might be things like:

• Age
• Sex
• Height
• Skin colour
• Hair colour
• Family ties
• Religion observed
• Disabilities / Special abilities

Factual descriptions can be as comprehensive as you like. I put anything that springs to mind, and try and round it off with a missing-persons-style check-list. Imagine your character hadn’t turned up after a big weekend out, and you were filing a missing person’s description with the police. What would help identify them?

Observations can be simple statements.
Joe hates cheeseburgers.
Xephiroth was spawned from a High Ritual gone wrong in the Dakielith Era.
Mindy’s eyes get bloodshot when she’s angry, stressed, or tired.

Observations are often simply notes that will spring to your mind as you write. This is why it’s a good idea to have both documents open at once -when you’re writing your story proper, if a little factoid springs into existence as you write, you can Alt-Tab across to your Writing Bible, slot it in quickly, and get back to writing. As always, don’t worry about making it too neat.

When you first create a character in your writing, don’t be afraid to simply copy and paste whatever descriptions you’ve created across to the Writing Bible. You can smooth it out later.

What else might you want to put in there? Your character’s relationships, history, attitudes, bank balance – whatever springs to your mind as important is something that’s worth keeping. Any detail that you can devote the time to writing down is going to help. If it gets used in your story, then well and good. If not, it’s fleshed your character out in your mind, and that’s only a good thing.

And, honestly, you’ll never be able to tell in advance whether it’s worth knowing that your heroine’s grandfather collected model aeroplanes.

Minor Characters
Bakers, butchers, barmen, bikers, brawlers, beauties, bawdy-men – all of them become more real when they move from the generic to the specific.

Giving characters names – even if they’re only in one scene -can be a great way of bringing them to life. Note these down here. You can flesh them out if you want, maybe note down the one or two oddities that lift them out of the mundane to the personable.

Remember that when your protagonists interact with people regularly, they’re going to know each other’s names. Constantly referring to ‘the barman’ is both dry and unoriginal. Referring to ‘Shelley’ in one chapter and ‘Sheila’ in another is confusing and awkward. Use of your Writing Bible avoids both these issues.

Organisations / Groups / Factions
Got yourself a cabal that wants to take over the world? An obstructive Government Department of Bureaucracy getting in your heroes’ way? A Baroque weaving of families, plots, romances and betrayals?

Want to make it a little less faceless? Infiltrate it? Understand the power structures? Use a section devoted to groups within your story to lay out who’s in charge of what, how they all know each other, and what’s happening between the groups.

Having a clandestine meeting between enigmatic unknowns is one thing. Having a clandestine meeting where you, the writer, know exactly what everyone’s agenda is makes for better writing. Not only do you get a clearer direction of where things are headed, but your readers will be able to enjoy figuring out who’s saying what on their second read through.

Having the group dynamics laid out, forcing yourself to make choices and assessments, also grounds your story with a level of realism. It’s well and good to have your villains all-powerful, your spy networks all-seeing, but knowing who has what fingers in what pies makes the experience more palatable for everyone.

Settings – Large
If you’ve read the Creating Worlds series, you’ll know I’m a big fan of developing rich, detailed worlds to base your stories in.

Even if you’re basing your work in Earth or another location which everyone’s got a good understanding of, it’s a good idea to have a quick overview of where everything is. This is a great place to go to town with physical facts and descriptions.

It’s also a good place to cover things like what season it is, where exactly in your world the story’s taking place, and anything that might be different about an otherwise-mundane setting.

Settings – Small
Once you start to zoom in closer, you can get into a lot more detail. Here is where you want to break down information about the locales of your story. How small you go is up to you, but any place that gets visited more than once is definitely worth an entry.

Someone’s kitchen.
An arena.
An alley.
A bar.
A barracks.

All of these places, if you write about them, have the capacity to feature more than once in your story. As such, they’re worth spending some time fleshing out. Describe them. Mention what goes on in them. Copy and paste whatever descriptive passages you’ve already put in your writing. Make the spaces real.

Systems
When writing fiction, often there are systems in place in yor story which you need to keep track of.
These systems can be anything – magical, physical properties of your world, political systems of government, courtly etiquette.

Whatever rules you generate for your world go here. For example, in my current novel’s Writing Bible, I have System entries for the innate magical talents of nine different races, the systems electing governing bodies of three different City-States, and some notes on the economic interactions between the three.

General Histories
Specific histories – the backstory of your characters – are best left in their entries. However, when you create a story, you don’t create the characters in a vacuum. You create your own instance of the world they inhabit. Depending on where, when and how your story is set, you may have a little or a lot of back-story to work on.

Has there been an Apocalypse? A zombie uprising? Even if we don’t find out all the details in the story, it helps if you’ve mapped out What Has Gone Before.
Writing a historical story? Then this is where the summaries of your research go. This is where you lay out the meat and bones of your back-story, the pre-narrative events that bring us up to the points of action and interest.

Think of the General Histories section of your Writing Bible as a verisimilitude-generator. Knowing what has come before makes your story consistent and gives your characters a common framework to base their experiences and attitudes off.

Timeline
What sort of timeline is your story set over? Do you need to make notes of dates in history – either before, during, or after your story? What if you want to plan out a possible sequel, or the latter two thirds of a trilogy? Here’s a great place to lay down a sense of scale.

You can also plot out the time-lines for events in your story in more detail here. Nothing’s more awkward in trying to weave together disparate plot elements, only to realise you’ve given your hero two hours to fly from Paris to New York in order to defuse a bomb…

Outside References
Sometimes, your writing is going to need outside reference material. If it’s historic, then you’re probably going to spend some time with your nose in history books, soaking up characters, events and places. You might want to refer to journal articles, online encyclopaedias, quotes, images. You can use a Reference section to either link to information you’ve found on the ‘Net, or to put it into the body of your Writing bible directly.

This is also great for providing a reference for acknowledgements if you publish your story. Keeping track of the people who’ve helped you in your writing process is important. Thanking them publicly is a great ego boost for them and acknowledges your use of their time and expertise.

Special Extras
I’ve forgotten something, right? I always do.
What? You have too? That’s OK! This is what the Special Extras is for, that funky little catch-all that hides the mistakes we writers invariably make.

Notes
Some hints and cautions:

Don’t enhance your Writing Bible to the detriment of writing time.
Creating and cross-sourcing reference material should not take away precious Butt On Seat, Fingers On Keyboard moments. It’s an addictively pleasing feeling to have your worlds and characters unfurl in front of your eyes. Don’t neglect making it happen in the story itself.

Copy and paste at will.
Nobody says your Writing Bible has to be dry, clinical, or meet Wikipedia’s editorial standards. The Writing Bible for my current project is a sprawling behemoth, full of formatting oddities and copy-pastes from my novel;s various drafts, news articles, blog posts, Word of the Day snippets, anything that’s caught my attention over the span of the writing project. What matters is that you can get what you need out of it. The Writing Bible doesn’t have to be pretty.

Consider your privacy.
I’d suggest thinking before sharing your Bible with readers, be it your writing confidantes, reading circle, friends, family, proofreaders. Especially if your story is unfinished.

There are a few reasons for this. You might spoil the plot for them. They might not be enamoured with the idea of wading through lots of messy material. They might approach your story with altered perceptions of how they want the story to unfold.

Remember, your real-world readers aren’t going to have an encyclopaedia to refer to. Having reference material to refer to as a writer can become a crutch you lean on. Other readers are coming to your story with fresh eyes and minds. It’s important not to cloud that amongst your writing peers and first-rank reviewers.

Phew!
OK, I’m done.
Go! Be free!
Have fun working on your very-own Writing Bible!

If you have any comments, I’d love to hear from you, below. As always, fire any questions at me and I’ll answer as best I can.

Go Write!