It's happened to everyone. You're writing along, chest-deep in the groove of the story, barrelling forward, and in walks a character you've not seen since the start of the previous novel. Everyone turns to look at them, and - wait, what did they look like, again? Did they have a weird speech mannerism? Do they like sushi?

What do you do? Stop everything and trawl through your work, looking for previous references? Skip over this bit with big FILL THIS IN LATER notes? Wing it and promise yourself you'll check it later (hah)? Whatever you do, your stride is now broken, the engine of story that was driving you along now sputtering and flicking on its fuel light.

And it's entirely avoidable. In television, there's something called a series bible. It details everything you need to write for that series - every character complete with description, motivations, loves, hates, fears, history, locations and their details, plot items, current and previous plot lines and other miscellania. When writing an episode for a series, a writer will (if they're lucky) be handed a copy of the series bible with their script concept, and almost any question they have can be answered by that book.

You need one of those.

What goes in the bible

A writer's bible is a similar thing. Although, unless you're James Patterson, you're not going to be farming out your work to other people, so several sections, such as what 'suits' the work, things mustn't be said or done, themes that won't be dealt with, aren't relevant. What is relevant is the reference for your characters, locations, items and arcs.

It's a personal preference what you actually put in your bible - it is, after all, a working reference, so what it contains needs to be things that help you work. However, the basics should be the same in any bible:

• For characters, you want to include at least their vital stats and description, what story they're from, a brief note on their internal character or quirks, where their personal storyline is going, relationships to other characters and any significant events. Anything that you have to remember when writing them - such as an accent, a very low or high inteligence, etc should go in the bible.
• For locations, you want descriptions, a reference to any other nearby locations, climate and weather or any special indigenous life (if it's a large location), or specific furniture or decorations (if it's a smaller location, like a room or house). Record significant events that took place, characters that have any affinity or hatred for the place, special effects or secrets that the room has.
  • It's up to you whether to split out (for example) a character's house into separate entries per room, or have one entry for the whole general location. The best indicator would be how much time the story spends there. If your story takes place almost exclusively in five out of six rooms in a house, each room had probably better have an individual entry. If the house is just somewhere the character sleeps every now and again, though, it can probably be condensed into the one.
• For items, you again need a description, and the item's history and purpose. What it is, what it does, who's had it, what they did with it and when. If an item's true purpose, origins or other important information has not yet been revealed, be sure to still record what it is (and record that this information isn't known). If you come back to a series after three years and you haven't written it down, chances are it'll be gone.
• Storylines you may want to include with entries on the characters involved, or as entries in their own right - personal choice. Personally, I prefer to use cross-referencing to cut down on my duplication - meaning I default to making something its own entry and referencing it from any other relevant entries rather than copying the same information into another entry. So if two characters share a storyline, the storyline itself is a separate entry, with the two characters referring to it. Each to their own, though.

There will be other things you want to record - don't let my list restrain you, this is just meant as a starting point. This is your bible to work from, so it had better work for you.

Putting it all together

Some writers create multiple series bibles - an individual reference for each series they work on. I prefer a more general approach - I only want to be looking in the one place for something. So I combine all my work into the one bible. If I have two characters or places with similar names, it's not as if I can't easily distinguish one from the other in paretheses, anyway.

How you organise your bible is up to you. While it might seem logical to put things in categories - character, location, item, etc - I find pure alphabetical much easier to deal with. There's no need to worry about cross-categorisation (if you have a location or item that's also a character, for example. Hey, this is science fiction we're talking about), you just look up the name. If you have multiple entries of the same name, put some clear identifier such as the title of the series in brackets beside it (and reconsider your apparent attraction to that name...). With everything in the one place, organised the one way, there's no hunting around to find what you're looking for - just go to your bible, look up the name.

There is something to be said for efficient cross-indexation, however, for times when you can't remember the name. If you're using Microsoft Word (or equivilent), or an online or desktop wiki, you can create an automatic index using specific keywords. I like to have a section at the start* of each entry for 'tags' - words that I use for indexing. I use mispelled versions of the real words ('charcter' for 'character', 'loction' for 'location', for example) so that the only place my tag words will be found is where I intentionally put them. That way, I won't have extraneous entries in my index.

If you use sub-entries to distinguish individual entries, such as 'Charcter - Aaron Maine, Anne Smith, 'etc, each main tag ends up being a kind of sub-table-of-contents, where you'll have a list of all the characters you've got, or all the locations. That way, you keep a simple system (alphabetical) without sacrificing versatility (searchability). If you need to (for example) print out all entries for a particular character, set of characters, book, location, etc, you can select the page numbers easily by cross-referencing sections in the index.

Again, what you tag is very dependent on how you work, but some tags to consider:

• character, location, item
• story (list the title as the sub-entry, so you'll have a list of your story titles each with a list of all entries relevant to them)
• common descriptors for characters (blonde, blue-eyed, tall, fat, mean, hero, coward)
• common descriptors for locations (desert, jungle, ocean, island, alien)
• common descriptors for item (ring, staff, magic, science, weapon)
• other - what do you think of when you consider your characters, locations and items? Remember, you're thinking of what you'd be using to try to find this entry.

It's difficult to find the balance of too many tags and not enough. On the one hand, you don't want to spend all your time tagging, but on the other, you don't want to not be able to find something because you didn't tag it thoroughly. There's no hard rule, here. You need to find your own balance between having enough tags that you can easily find what you want, and describe what you have, and not so many that you're applying them inconsistently - that's almost worse than no tags at all.

* Protip: you should put tags at the start if you're using a word document as your bible, otherwise all your index entries will be for the last page of the entry, instead of the first.

A working reference

I said before this was a working reference, and it is. Your bible is a living thing, it needs to change and grow as your writing does - it's no good having an outdated bible. However, what you don't want to do is get information muddled when you change your mind about things - if you write a whole subplot about Character A changing Location B, and then decide it needs to be cut, you don't want to forget to strip it out of your bible, as well, especially when some things have intricate and far-reaching consequences. Tracing all those back again is a nightmare.

For this reason, I recommend bastadising another television concept - the pink pages. Pink pages are last-minute edits to a script, printed literally on pink paper to make it easy to tell versions apart. You don't need actual pink paper, however - just a section at the end of each entry for 'current notes' - notes from what you're currently doing with the character. While you're writing, you keep updating the notes with any changes - you do not touch the main entry. Once the book is finished and published (ie, no more changes can be made) you go through your current notes, and check them against the story - ensure that they actually happened. Then make them canon - put them in the main entry, and clear the 'current notes' section, which will be used for the next book.

A writing bible can help organise your ideas, keep your process efficient, and even show aspects or concepts you favour too heavily (are all your characters towering rake-thin snivellers, for example, or light-on-ther-feet jolly fat men? Does everything always happen in a jungle?). It's also a great mine for turning ideas on their head. It may sound daunting to create at first, but once you have one rolling, the minimal amount of maintenance is more than worth the convenience it brings.