Knowing you should keep a story bible is easy. Knowing what to actually put in it — and what people leave out until a contradiction forces the issue — is the part that decides whether your canon holds. This is the complete checklist, organized by section, with the commonly-missed facts called out for each.
There are two ways a story bible fails on content. The loud way is a missing section — you simply never wrote down the magic system, and now two scenes disagree about what it costs. The quiet way is more common and more dangerous: the section exists, but the one fact inside it that was going to matter was left implicit, because at the time it felt too obvious to record. This checklist is built around that second failure. For every section, it names not just what goes in it but the specific fact writers most often leave out — the one that comes back as a continuity error three installments later.
Run your current world against it. The gaps you find are the contradictions you have not noticed yet.
The eight sections, and what each must hold
Every story bible, in any medium, is assembled from the same eight sections. The first four are the ones almost everyone remembers to create — and still under-fills in a predictable place.
Premise & logline. The story's core, conflict, and tone in a paragraph. Most-missed: an explicit statement of tone. Writers capture what the story is about and skip how it is supposed to feel, and that is the omission that later lets a scene land in the wrong register — a joke in a funeral, a grimdark turn in a cozy mystery — with nothing in the bible to say it broke a rule.
Characters. Name, role, age/timeframe, traits, relationships, arc, and current status. Most-missed: status over time — who is alive, where they are, and what they know as of each point in the story. This single omission causes more continuity breaks than any other, because a character's status is not one fact but a series of facts that change, and a bible that records only the latest one cannot tell you a character grieved a death two chapters before it happened.
World rules & systems. How your world works and what its powers cost. Most-missed: the cost. Writers diligently record that magic exists, that the ansible sends messages faster than light, that the crown passes to the eldest — and forget to record the price, the limit, the exception. A rule with no cost written down is a rule that drifts scene to scene, because each scene gets to decide the cost fresh.
Timeline & history. Events in chronological order, including the backstory that predates page one. Most-missed: character birth years relative to events. Ages and sequence are where a world quietly becomes impossible — a mentor who would have been eight years old during the war he fought in — and they are invisible in prose and obvious the instant the events sit on a real timeline.
The four sections people skip
The second four are the ones that get deferred — "I'll add that later" — and later is usually after the contradiction has already shipped.
Locations & setting. Places, their relationships, travel times, and the rules specific to each. Most-missed: distances. Undocumented geography produces the classic journey that takes a day in one chapter and a week in another, because the bible recorded that the city exists but never how far it is from anywhere else.
Plot threads & arcs. Each open tension or mystery, its current state, and where it was last touched. Most-missed: the current state. Without it, threads get silently dropped — the reader remembers the missing sister nobody has mentioned in two hundred pages — or accidentally resolved twice, or given a payoff that contradicts the clue that set them up.
Lore & background. Static cultural and mythological context — myths, terminology, names, the texture of the world. Most-missed: a clean separation between lore and dated events. Bury an event in the lore section because it felt like flavor, and it vanishes from your timeline, where it was the very thing that would have caught the age error.
Style & canon notes. Spellings, naming conventions, tone guardrails, and the explicit rulings you have made. Most-missed: writing down the exceptions you have ruled canon. "Yes, she can use the artifact twice even though the rule says once — here is why." Record it, or you will re-litigate the same exception every month and rule it differently each time.
What a filled-in entry looks like
An abstract checklist is easy to nod along to and hard to act on, so here is a character entry done the way the checklist intends. Take Maren, sister to Toval. A thin entry reads: "Maren — Toval's sister, fierce, leads the rebellion." It has the static facts and none of the ones that change, which means none of the ones that break.
The same entry done properly is a small set of atomic, dated statements: Maren is Toval's older sister. She was twelve when their village burned. As of volume one she is a rebel lieutenant; as of volume three she leads the council. She does not learn that Toval survived until the volume-two finale. Each of those is independently checkable, and together they let a tool — or a careful editor — catch the scene in volume two where Maren mourns Toval as dead while already acting on knowledge she does not get until the finale.
Notice what made the difference. It was not more words; the thin version and the proper one are nearly the same length. It was that every fact that changes over time carries a timeframe, and every relationship is stated rather than implied. That is the whole discipline the checklist is trying to install.
The fact behind the checklist
Step back and look at the commonly-missed items as a group: tone, status over time, cost, birth year relative to events, distance, current state, the lore/event boundary, ruled exceptions. Almost every one is the same kind of thing — a fact about how something changes or relates over time, rather than a fact that simply is.
That is not a coincidence. Static facts are easy to record because they feel like the answer to "what is this?" Relationships and changes feel like context, so they get left implicit — and implicit facts are exactly the ones that contradict each other later, because nobody wrote down the version they were checking against. The checklist works by forcing the implicit facts into the open, where they can be seen and, eventually, verified.
There is a matching trap on the other side: over-recording. A bible does not need every meal a character eats or every street in a city that appears once. The test is whether a fact constrains a future scene. If forgetting it could produce a contradiction, it belongs in the bible; if not, it is set dressing, and burying the load-bearing facts under set dressing is its own way of losing them.
From checklist to check
A checklist gets these facts onto the page. It still cannot tell you when two of them disagree — that a character's recorded status in one entry contradicts an event on the timeline, that a power's cost in the rules section is ignored by a scene that invokes it. A static document stores facts; it never reads itself.
CanonBoard turns this checklist into structure. Each section becomes a type of card on an open canvas — character, world rule, timeline event, plot thread, lore — and because each fact knows what it is, the engine can scan the whole world and surface the contradictions the checklist alone would never catch, with both sides quoted and the conflict named. Build the world against the checklist, run the check, then write against a bible that actually holds.
Frequently asked questions
- What should you include in a story bible?
- Eight sections: premise, characters, world rules, timeline, locations, plot threads, lore, and style and canon notes — with special attention to facts that change over time, such as a character's status, the cost of a power, and distances between locations.
- What do writers most often leave out of a story bible?
- Time-dependent facts: a character's status over time, the cost of a power, distances between locations, and explicit canon rulings. These are exactly the facts that later contradict each other.
CanonBoard scans your whole world and tells you where it disagrees with itself.
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