Why I’m Finally Building a Story Bible

(and Why I Wish I’d Done It Years Ago)

I’ve just spent the morning doing tax.

And that means my brain feels like it’s been through the mangle, wrung out, and hung on the line in a stiff wind. To take my mind off the tax-chaos I thought I’d chat with you about something that’s been quietly saving my sanity over the last few weeks: the story bible.

If you’d asked me a month ago what a story bible was, I’d have blinked at you, likely my jaw would have hung open and I’d have made a noise like, ‘Duhh ???’. I might have said – probably slightly acerbically – I’m not a Gamer. But I wouldn’t really have known what a story bible was. Could well have thought ‘Errm, useful perhaps, but not really me. I write from my bones. I know my worlds. I don’t need crib notes for my own imagination.’

How wrong I’d have been! I bloomin’ do.

Over midwinter, I began pulling together book titles I’ve writ (column A) and book titles I want to write (column B). Heck! It was a long list. I’ve been writing for a long time. Decades. And over that time, my fictional world – that I now call the Celtic Noir lands – has grown quietly, organically, like a wood that started with one oak and now covers a whole hillside.

Different series. Different characters. Different tones. But the same land underpins them all.

The trouble with that kind of long, slow growth is that nothing is ever neat, it’s not like the flowerbeds in the municipal park. Characters cross paths. Landscapes recur, and they also get juggled around – all writers juggle geography 😊. A river you named once, twenty years ago, suddenly matters again. A throwaway detail – seven stepping stones across a stream, say – becomes important when a character needs to cross it again, under pressure, in another book entirely.

And that’s where things start to fry my brain. I can get lost in my own wood, or need a machete to hack my way out of a bramble tangle because I can’t find the old path I know is there. Somewhere!

Now I don’t get lost in the big, mythic sense. I don’t lose the soul of the work, I get lost in practical, irritating ways that pull me out of the flow. Think questions like:

• Was it seven stepping stones or nine?
• Did that village sit upstream or downstream?
• How long was that journey meant to take – hours, a day, or ‘before dark’?
• Was Merle already a werewolf by this point, or did that come later?
• Have I already named this bothy, am I about to contradict myself?

I could, and have done of course, go back and reread. But that tends to fry my brain too.

The moment the penny dropped …

I was editing The Carpet, the first Shapeshifters’ Arms novella so I can publish it as an eBook in a couple of weeks.

On the surface, it’s a tight, punchy story: a job goes right but the getaway goes wrong, a sick magic carpet crash-lands the heroine, Grym, in a horse trough, she has to make plans to go back and finish the job.

Simple enough.

Except it isn’t just one story. It’s the opening move in a whole series of interlinked tales. Characters introduced here will turn up later. Decisions made here ripple forward. And while I know these people, I suddenly realised I was holding an awful lot in my head that did not need to live there. Like juggling twenty-one plates on sticks!

That’s when the idea of a story bible came banging on my brain.

Not as something that tells me how to write, or fences in my imagination (the gods forbid!) – but something that remembers facts for me, so I don’t have to cart all that baggage around cluttering my mind. I even got a fantabulous vision-memory of my beloved (and acerbic) English teacher. She was showing us how to use a library, told us, ‘The trick is to know where to find the information when you want it, not try to remember everything forever in your own head.’ Thank you Mrs Westcott 😊

So, what is a story bible (for me)

I’ll be using it to store the facts.

Facts like: Names. Places. Distances. Who was where, when. What already happened. Clothes they wore, what rooms looked like, food, drink. How did people travel? How long to get from here to there? And – very important – which facts are locked, and which are still fluid.

In other words, a reference system.

Long ago and far away, I used to design relational databases for my bread-n-butter. For the Ministry of Defence, if you please! I actually found it fascinating, politically educational too! Tables. Relationships. Queries.

And suddenly I got it: that’s what I need for my writing world.

Not a big explanatory document. A living, queryable reference-system.

A database that can answer questions –actually just like how we all use Google! So my story bible will be really useful in practice, not just an ideas-caddy.

Here’s the kinds of questions my story bible will be able to answer for me:

• How many stepping stones were in that river crossing?
• Which rivers have I already used on Exmoor?
• Have I named this settlement before?
• How does travel usually work in this region – ponies, feet, magic mirrors or carpets?
• Is this character already connected to someone else in another series?
• What do folk here do for beer, wine, food?
• Have I already described this room  specifically?

When I ask those questions I don’t want to have to ferret about hunting down the answers. I just want the fact I need, now. Or, equally important, I want to know I’ve not set this in stone yet, so I can create it, or not, depending on the story.

What the story bible is not … and this is important:

The story bible is not:

• a rulebook
• a moral framework
• a corporate policy document
• a way of flattening mystery
• a substitute for intuition

It actually protects my intuition by stopping me being dragged out of the story by having to do a reread to find a wee fact I’d forgot, I can stay on the job, inside the story itself.

Why I wish I’d done this sooner?

I’ve been writing since I could hold a pencil, my worlds began when I was a wee kiddie, over the decades the places and people have become all joined up, the world has become very complex and multi-layered, it has history.

So I need a library to hold all the facts neatly so they don’t get in a tangle. And that’s precisely what it does. When I want a reference I can visit my story-bible-library and look up the reference I need. And that takes me back a whole lot of years to when I was doing the research for Owl Woman in the Reading Room at the British Museum. The Reading Room is now just a beautiful place for tourists to visit, all the books and desks gone. It grew too big so they moved the whole shebang to the British Library over in Euston Road near King’s Cross St Pancras station. But I remember. I used to love it in there.

And now I think I’m going to love having my own version 😊.

If you’re a writer – and you’ve not yet got yourself a story bible – how about you think about giving it a whirl?

Well, that’s it for now, folks, I gotta get back to finishing off the tax 🤯.

Hope I survive to see you all next week 😉.