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.
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
Premise & logline. The story's core, conflict, and tone in a paragraph. Most-missed: an explicit statement of tone, which is what later keeps a scene from landing in the wrong register.
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.
World rules & systems. How your world works and what its powers cost. Most-missed: the cost. Writers record that magic exists and forget to record its price, so the price drifts scene to scene.
Timeline & history. Events in order, including pre-story backstory. Most-missed: character birth years relative to events, which is how age and sequence errors slip in.
The four sections people skip
Locations & setting. Places, their relationships, and travel times. Most-missed: distances. Undocumented geography produces journeys that take a day in one chapter and a week in another.
Plot threads & arcs. Each open tension, its state, and where it was last touched. Most-missed: a thread's current state, without which threads get dropped or resolved twice.
Lore & background. Static cultural and mythological context. Most-missed: a clean separation between lore and dated events — bury an event in the lore section and it vanishes from your timeline.
Style & canon notes. Spellings, naming conventions, and the explicit rulings you have made. Most-missed: writing down exceptions you have ruled canon, so you stop re-deciding them every month.
The fact behind the checklist
Notice that nearly every commonly-missed item is the same kind of thing: a fact about how something changes or relates over time. Status, cost, distance, sequence, state. Static facts are easy to record; relationships and changes are what get left implicit — and implicit facts are exactly the ones that contradict each other later.
A checklist gets these facts onto the page. It still cannot tell you when two of them disagree. That is a job for a bible that can read its own contents and check them against each other.
From checklist to check
CanonBoard turns this checklist into structure. Each section is a type of card on a canvas, 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. Build the world, run the check, then write against a bible that 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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