The Story Bible

Everything you know about the book that is not the prose itself. One Story Bible serves every manuscript in the project, so a character who appears in three books is one record, not three.

The record types

Theme and Note are deliberately the thinnest record types here — a name, a summary, notes and whatever custom fields you add, and nothing more type-specific than that. There's no hidden structure underneath either one worth documenting.

What each record actually holds

The table above is the quick version. Some types carry real, type-specific structure worth knowing about — either because there's more to fill in than "summary and notes," or because a field feeds a specific analysis tool in a way that isn't obvious from the record alone.

Character

Anyone the book has an opinion about, and the type with the most to say for itself. Beyond the free-text biography, physical description and voice notes, dedicated fields carry the psychology the analysis tools actually read: external goal, internal need, primary fear and desire, a false belief and the truth that corrects it, a starting state and an ending state. A biographical group (occupation, nationality, languages, socioeconomic status) and two personality-framework fields (MBTI type, Enneagram type) sit alongside — useful for your own reference, read by nothing.

Three things live under a character's own record rather than in it, each in its own section: States, snapshots of how the character looked, where they lived, or what they knew at a point in the story's own timeline; Knowledge, what a character knows and when they learned it — the raw material Continuity Check… reads to catch someone reacting to news they haven't heard yet (see The Tools menu); and trait ratings, checked off either from the record's own Worksheet view or cast-wide from Character Balance… in the Characters browser — the same data either way, kept in sync (see The analysis tools).

Writing memoir or autofiction, a character can also carry a real name kept separate from the one used in the manuscript — Name Registry and Apply Pseudonyms to Prose… are what actually swap between them (see The analysis tools).

Location

Places, at any scale from a room to a continent, described one sense at a time — sight, sound, smell, touch and taste are each their own field, not one description doing all the work. A Hierarchy section sets a location's parent (a room contained in a house, a house in a city) and shows the reverse — everything it contains — as a breadcrumb and a list; that one section is the only place in the app that builds or shows this structure.

Like a character, a location can carry a real name kept separate from the one used in the manuscript, for the same memoir/pseudonym workflow.

A location's completeness ring never gets a coloured "read by an analysis tool" mark, whatever fields are empty — nothing in the app currently reads a location's fields the way it reads a character's or a scene's. See Full, Compact and Necessities.

Event

Something that happens, described twice over: when it happened, in the story's own loose terms ("the summer after the funeral"), and — separately — a sortable date and a narrative-sequence number that place it on the two clocks the Timeline tool draws: story time and reading order. Where the two disagree, that's a flashback (see The analysis tools).

Participants records who was there and in what role. Who and what role is what Continuity Check… reads to flag a character in two places at once, or travelling somewhere impossible in the time available, and what the Relationship Graph reads to draw a line between a character and the event. The richer per-participant fields — emotional state before and after, what they learned, how it turned out for them — are yours to fill in for your own reference; nothing currently reads them back.

An event is also where a Source record attaches a citation — see Source, below, and Evidence Board in The analysis tools.

Plot Item

A thread — a question, a secret, a promise, a gun on the mantel — typed as one of sixteen kinds, with notes at each stage: introduction, development, resolution, aftermath. Where it's introduced and resolved, given as a position in the book rather than a chapter link, is what Loose Ends and Spine Report both read, each asking a different question of the same two numbers — a plot item with no position set is invisible to Spine Report even though Loose Ends still flags it. See The analysis tools.

Story Arc

A change over the length of the book, broken into ordered beats — and an arc's real complexity lives in how those beats get used elsewhere, not in the arc record itself. Each beat carries an intensity rating that becomes a point on the Plot Board's tension curve, and can be linked to an event, a scene, a location and any number of characters. Drag a beat onto a chapter in the Plot Board, and that placement is what Spine Report reads as the beat "arriving" in that chapter — a beat linked only through its scene, never actually dropped on a column, won't show up there. See The analysis tools for Plot Board and Spine Report, and the separate Structure tool (reachable from this sidebar's own section, though its documentation still lives on that page), which measures the whole book against a different, template-driven kind of beat entirely — not this one.

Chapter

Mostly bookkeeping — its number, which part it's filed under, a word count and target — but the bookkeeping is load-bearing: a chapter's scenes, point-of-view characters, arcs and plot items are what Structure and Spine Report actually measure against. See The binder for how chapter numbering and part filing work.

Scene

The largest record type in the app, and worth being precise about because it uses the word "beat" three different ways across three different tools. A scene's own goal, conflict, turning point, crisis choice and outcome are the fields Five C's and Scene Grid both read. A separate set of six narrative beats — Hook, Setup, Trigger, Wrangle, Action, Climax — is what Spine Report counts as missing or filled. Neither of those is an arc beat, which belongs to a Story Arc record instead (above) and is placed on the Plot Board. See The analysis tools.

A scene also tracks its own value shift, in the Emotional Arc section: an emotional value before and after in your own words, plus the same shift as a number from -2 to +2 — this is what Scene Grid's charts actually draw. A separate Story Value section holds the identical pair for the plot's own line rather than the character's, since a scene can win the argument and lose the person and the two are worth tracking apart. Beyond value, a scene tracks two chronological positions: where it falls in story order versus where it falls in reading order, for a manuscript that doesn't tell its story straight through.

Both a chapter and a scene also carry an In-Story Date field — when it happens in the book's own time, in your own words, the same way an event's date is written. It's what places that chapter or scene on the History footer strip while you're writing it (see History), and Find Only What's Missing… can fill it in from the manuscript's prose for a chapter or scene that doesn't have one yet — see Reading the manuscript with AI.

Object

Things that matter physically — an heirloom, a weapon, a letter — typed from a list of sixteen kinds (weapon, vehicle, document, treasure, and so on), with fields for who owns it, who made it, and where it came from, plus separate notes for what makes it special, why it matters to the story, and how it was acquired.

Organization

Institutions, families, factions — typed (government, criminal, guild, cult, and others) with a status of its own (active, disbanded, underground, fractured). Its most useful field may be the least obvious: a public reputation field kept deliberately separate from its true nature, for the organizations whose face and substance don't match.

Source

Research and citations, held as a proper bibliographic record — author, title, publisher, year, DOI, ISBN — the same shape a citation manager like Zotero or Bookends uses, and importable from either. Every source gets a citekey; typing [@citekey] in your prose or notes is how you cite it inline.

Attaching a source to an event — with a page or timestamp, an extract, and a reliability rating — is what Evidence Board reads to show which claims in a memoir or history project are backed by a source and which are thin or unsourced. See The analysis tools.

Connecting records to the prose

Three different things build the connections the analysis tools read, and they cost you different amounts of effort:

• Wikilinks. Type [[Ada Marsh]] in your prose and the mention is a link. This is the cheapest way to tell Sgeulai who is in a scene, because you do it while writing rather than afterwards.
• Fields on the record. A scene's point-of-view character, an event's location, an object's owner. These are pickers on the record.
• Detected from the text. Detect Appearances on the Character Arc tool reads each section for character names and wikilinks and fills in who appears where. Detect Dates on the Timeline does the same for dates.

Completeness

Each record shows a ring counting how many of its essential fields are filled. It is a prompt rather than a score: a location with an empty climate field is not a worse location, and nothing in the app behaves differently because the ring is not full.

What does change behaviour is a blank field that an analysis tool reads — and those are marked separately, in a different colour, for exactly that reason. See Full, Compact and Necessities.

Merging duplicates

A long manuscript read in sections can produce the same person twice under two spellings. Records offer a Merge action for this, which keeps one record and repoints everything that referred to the other.