Young Writers Society

Hey guys,

So this is actually something I learned from a YouTuber I watch (yes, I'm such a geek that I watch Writing YouTube videos) a while ago and I started doing it and I love it. It works really well especially if you're working on a series or a really long novel. It's called creating a Story Bible. I do it a bit differently than most people and my way is probably more work than most people's way would be. But, since some of you may like my way, I'll tell you how I do it.

The first thing I do is open four or five documents. (For my current project I have 3. World Notes, Character Notes, and Series Notes.) I categorize those documents into notes for each part of this novel I'm building. I take about a week to get everything I know about this world and these characters into those documents. (My last project, I had 50 pages at the end of one of my documents.) Anything and everything I can think of, I put into those notes. Some things you write down won't even make it into your book but it's good to know everything about it.

The next and last thing I do is to take the information in those documents and create another document. This document will eventually be the Story Bible. I call it my personal Wikipedia Page and I organize it like one. You can organize this any way that will work for you, of course, as long as it's organized in a way that is easy for you to navigate when you need it. You can add to the Story Bible as you go along, of course, and it's really convenient when you need to know something and you don't remember where you wrote it down.

Anyways, that's my tip. Hope someone can use it. And if anyone else does this, let me know.

Colly.

That's really interesting!

I usually write things on separate documents and print them out because the only organisation system I can really make sense of is one that's splattered across my bedroom wall.

When you put them into one big document, do you have it as a continuous streaming text or do you organise it into chapters or sections?

I just started planning sort of like this. I got sick of not finishing novels so I planned out the key points of each chapter, etc. I also have character sheets written up- or almost written up on the characters, and all the information of the world and such will go on there too.

I used to just keep all this info in my mind and that did not work in the long run, so we'll see if this will help.

Usually it is just one long document that I add to over time. It looks sort of like a wikipedia page that you just add to as you're working. I used to be terrible at finishing novels so I tried this and it really worked for me. I love it. It takes some work but it's a really good idea in the long run.

I use a mixture of Evernote and a massive Word/Google document. Evernote has a lot of useful features like folders and tagging, so that's where all my notes go, especially since I constantly add notes even while I'm in the process of writing.

The Word/Google document is pretty straightforward in comparison, though I always make sure to use appropriate headings for chapters and scene breaks so I can quickly jump to whatever section I need to write/edit via the Navigation Pane/Table of Contents/Outline.

Have a screencap: