Search for "story bible template" and you'll find hundred-field monsters: documents that ask for your protagonist's blood type, favorite season, and childhood pet before you've written a scene. Most of them are procrastination with a table of contents. A story bible has exactly one job — answer questions your manuscript will ask later — and everything in the template should be judged against that job.
This is the template we recommend, the reasoning behind each section, and the maintenance habit that decides whether the document lives or dies.
What a story bible is (and what it isn't)
A story bible is the canonical record of facts your story has established: who people are, where places sit, what happened when, and what rules the world obeys. It exists so that chapter twenty-two cannot contradict chapter four.
It is not a planning document. Outlines, theme notes, and "what should happen next" brainstorms belong elsewhere — mixing speculation into the bible is how contradictions get canonized. The test for every entry: has the manuscript established this? If yes, it's bible material. If it's still an idea, it isn't.
The six-section template
1. Characters
One entry per named character who appears in more than one scene. Per entry:
- Fixed facts — birth year, family, appearance, pre-story history
- State changes by chapter — injuries, secrets learned, relationships shifted, one line each
- Voice anchor — 3–5 lines of their actual dialogue from your draft
- Knowledge ledger — what they know that others don't, and when they learned it
This is the highest-traffic section and the one that pays for the whole document. For the full reasoning, see our guide to character consistency.
2. Locations
Geography generates quiet contradictions: a village that is "a hard day's ride" from the capital in book one and "visible from the city walls" in book two. Per location: where it is relative to other places, travel times between them, and any physical details the text has committed to (the inn has two floors; the river runs west).
3. Timeline
The single most error-prone structure in long fiction. Keep one master timeline with dated (or relatively dated — "three weeks after the fire") events. Every flashback, every "two winters ago," every character age claim gets checked against it. If you write a series, the timeline is what keeps book three from breaking book one — more on that in planning a series timeline.
4. Rules of the world
Magic systems, technology limits, political structures, supernatural costs. Record the rule and the chapter where it was established. Rule entries are contracts with the reader: a cost paid in chapter five cannot be waived in chapter thirty without an on-page reason.
If you're starting from a blank world, structured prompts can speed up this section considerably — we keep a free library of worldbuilding prompts organized by category.
5. Objects and artifacts
Anything physical that recurs: the letter, the sword, the photograph. Where it is right now, who has touched it, and what condition it's in. Misplaced objects are the plot holes readers screenshot.
6. Threads and foreshadowing
Every promise the text has made: the mysterious limp, the unopened door, the name the dying man whispered. One line per thread — planted where, paid off where (or "OPEN"). At revision time, this section is a checklist of debts; a thread still marked OPEN on the last page is either a sequel hook or a mistake, and you should know which.
What to leave out
Resist: character questionnaires (favorite color, zodiac sign), essays about themes, research dumps, and anything about chapters not yet written. Bloat is not harmless — every unnecessary field raises the cost of maintenance, and maintenance cost is what kills story bibles. The hundred-field template fails not because it's wrong but because nobody updates field 73.
The maintenance habit that decides everything
A story bible is only as good as its synchronization with the manuscript. The rule: update the bible in the same session as the scene that changed it. Finished a chapter where Mara learns the letter was forged? Her knowledge ledger gets a line before you close the laptop. Two minutes now, or two days of archaeology during revision.
The honest weakness of any document-based bible — Word, Notion, Scrivener's binder, a wiki — is that it cannot read your manuscript back. You maintain it, but nothing checks prose against it. That cross-referencing is exactly what fiction-first AI tools automate: in Creader, the bible isn't a document but a knowledge base of structured entities (characters, locations, events, rules), and every chapter is automatically checked against established canon, with contradictions flagged for your decision. Here's how that works in practice — or see how the approach compares to a worldbuilding wiki like World Anvil.
Start smaller than feels right
Begin with characters and timeline only — the two sections that catch 80% of contradictions. Add locations when geography starts to matter, rules when your world earns them, threads at the end of act one. A two-section bible that's current beats a six-section bible that's three chapters stale.
Your future self, deep in revisions at 2 a.m., asking "wait, when did she find out?" — that's who the bible is for. Build them something they can trust.