How to Write a Story Bible (Free Template)

My first one was forty pages. I built it over a long weekend, felt enormously organized, then never opened it again. The second was two pages. I used that one every single day for eight months.

The difference was not effort. It was that I finally understood what a story bible is for.

What it is for, which decides what goes in it

A story bible answers questions you will actually stop writing to look up.

That sentence is the whole method. If a detail would never interrupt your drafting, recording it is admin dressed as preparation. If you would genuinely pause mid-scene to check it, it belongs.

Apply that test and most of a forty-page document disappears:

The second column is where forty pages come from. Favorite meals feel like character work. They are procrastination with a nice format.

The five entries that earn their place

Premise, one paragraph. What the book is about, not what happens in it. "A woman goes home to bury her mother" is plot. "A woman finds out her grief is for someone who was lying to her" is premise. You will reread this whenever a scene feels aimless.

Each character: wants, hides, sounds like. Three lines, no more.

Ada. Wants the letter read. Hides that she already knows what it says. Speaks in short questions, never finishes an accusation.

That third line is the one most people skip and the one that pays off hardest. Two real lines of dialogue beat any description of how someone talks.

World rules, only the binding ones. Anything that must stay true or a reader will catch you. In fantasy that means what magic costs. In a contemporary novel it might be one commute time. The test is whether breaking it would be a mistake rather than a change.

Voice. Tense, person, plus two or three sentences of your own prose you are happy with. This is the entry that saves you after a two-week break. It is also why a story bible is not only a facts document.

What has happened so far. One line per chapter, written after you draft it. Three minutes a chapter. It becomes the thing you actually consult.

That last entry is also the one an AI drafting partner needs most. If you use Talk to your book or anything like it, the timeline is what turns vague questions into answerable ones.

The mistakes that cost me a weekend

Building it before you know the book. You cannot describe a character's wants in chapter one, because you find out by writing them. Start with premise and voice. Let everything else accrete.

Writing it as prose. Nobody reads a paragraph mid-scene. Fragments, tables, lists. This is a lookup document, not an essay.

Never updating it. A story bible that disagrees with your manuscript is worse than none, because now you have two versions of the truth and you will trust the wrong one at 11pm.

Treating it as a commitment. It is a record of current decisions. Change them freely. Just change the record too.

Where to keep it

Three honest options. The order of preference is less obvious than it looks.

A document. Free, portable, works forever. The cost is that it only helps if you open it. If you draft with AI, you also have to make sure the AI is reading the current version. Most people stop within a month.

A spreadsheet. Better for tracking who-knows-what over time, because rows carry timestamps naturally. Worse for voice.

Inside the tool you draft in. Mine lives in Story DNA, which is our name for it. Sudowrite calls theirs a Story Bible, Novelcrafter a Codex, NovelAI a Lorebook. Same category. What decided it for me is that every feature reads it before it writes rather than my having to remember what I set, that it holds voice and tone rather than facts alone, plus the fact that we have tested it past 500 pages without the back half degrading.

None of this matters if the entries are bad. A perfect system holding forty pages of favorite meals is still forty pages of favorite meals.

A template you can start with today

Copy this. It fits on one page and it is the version I actually use.

``` PREMISE (one paragraph, what it is about)

VOICE Tense / person: Sample (2-3 of your own sentences):

CHARACTERS (three lines each) Name. Wants: ___. Hides: ___. Sounds like: "___"

WORLD RULES (only the binding ones) 1. 2.

TIMELINE Ch 1 - day 0 - Ch 2 - day 3 -

OPEN QUESTIONS (things you have not decided yet) ```

That last section is the one nobody includes and everyone needs. Writing "I have not decided whether the mother is still alive" stops you from quietly deciding twice in different chapters.

If you write romantasy or anything with two braided arcs, add one line: what each arc promises the reader. Braided books fail when one promise quietly gets dropped. That is invisible unless it is written down.