Story bible template
A story bible is one document holding everything about your story that is not the story itself — who is in it, where it happens, what has already been decided. This one is blank on purpose. Every line below is a question; your answers are the bible.
Fill it in the way you would actually use it: one or two lines per answer, skipping whatever does not apply to your book, coming back to it as the story changes. It is not a form to finish before you are allowed to write — most of it is easier to answer after chapter three than before chapter one.
The premise
One or two lines saying what the book is, before anybody has read it. Without them every later choice floats: you cannot tell whether a scene belongs if you cannot say what the story is.
In one sentence: who wants what, and what is in the way?
If it takes three sentences, the story has not settled yet. Write all three, then cut.
What does a reader get here that they would not get from a book very like this one?
What would make a reader feel cheated at the end?
That is the promise you are making. Name it now and you will notice the day you break it.
Where does it start, and roughly where does it end?
What it is actually about
The argument under the plot — the thing the book keeps circling back to. Skip it and the ending comes out correct and unsatisfying, because nothing was ever being asked.
What question does the story keep asking, in different words, in every act?
What answer does the ending give to that question?
"None" is a fine answer, as long as it is a decision.
Which character is most wrong about it at the start?
The cast
Everyone the reader is expected to remember, and what each of them is for. A cast list without the "for" is how a novel ends up with four people doing one job.
Who is the story happening to?
The protagonist, by name, with an age and what they do all day.
Who is in the way, and why are they convinced they are right?
List every named character the reader has to track: one line each — role, and one thing that makes them recognisable on the page.
Which of them could be cut and folded into another?
Ask it now, while cutting one costs an afternoon instead of a rewrite.
What each one wants, and what they need
The want is what they would say out loud; the need is what the story will charge them to learn. A character with only a want stalls, and a character with only a need stands there watching.
What do they want badly enough to lose something over?
Concrete and external: the job, the apology, the key in the drawer.
What do they need, and would deny needing if you asked them in chapter one?
What are they wrong about, and which event makes staying wrong impossible?
Now the same for the antagonist: what do they want, and what would they call it?
Nobody is the villain of their own version.
Who feels what about whom
Relationships have a direction: what A feels for B and what B feels for A are two different facts, and the gap between them is where scenes come from. Written as a pair — "they have history" — it generates nothing.
For every pair that matters, write two lines: one in each direction.
"Mara resents Teo." "Teo admires Mara." Both true at once — that is the point.
What does each of them want from the other and never ask for?
Which relationship ends the book different from how it starts, and in which direction?
The world and its rules
The rules worth writing down are the ones a reader would notice being broken: the magic, the money, the law, the commute, the illness. What breaks without them is not plausibility — it is trust, and it goes quietly.
What is possible here that is not possible where your reader lives?
What does it cost, and who pays?
A rule that costs nothing is a convenience, and it reads like one.
What is the one thing that absolutely cannot happen in this world?
Who holds power, and how would an ordinary person be able to tell?
The places that come back
Only the locations that recur — the ones a reader has to recognise a second time. Three details each is plenty; a full inventory of the city is a hobby, not a bible.
List each recurring place: name, what it is for, and one detail it is recognisable by.
What does it smell like, sound like, feel like underfoot?
One sense other than sight per place. Cheapest way to stop everywhere looking the same.
Which place changes over the course of the book, and into what?
What has already happened
The timeline, including the parts before page one. Almost no continuity error is an invented fact — they are real facts in the wrong order.
What happened before the book starts that the reader will eventually need to know?
Put the events in the order they HAPPEN, not the order you tell them.
If the two differ you have a structure decision on your hands. Make it on purpose.
How much time passes in total?
Then check the seasons, the ages and the healing wounds against that number.
What is happening offstage while the point of view is elsewhere?
The shape
Where the story turns. You do not need a named method — you need to be able to say what changes at the quarter, the middle and the three-quarter mark, and why a reader keeps going between them.
What knocks the protagonist out of their ordinary life, and roughly on which page?
What happens in the middle that makes going back impossible?
What is the worst moment, and what is lost there?
How does the ending answer the opening?
If the first scene and the last could belong to two different books, something in between is not load-bearing.
Point of view and voice
Who is telling it, how close the camera sits, and what the narrator is not allowed to know. Drift here is invisible to the writer and obvious to the reader.
Whose head are we in? If it changes, where is it allowed to change?
First or third, past or present — and is that settled?
What can the narrator not know?
The commonest slip: a close third that suddenly reports what somebody else is thinking.
Describe the voice in three adjectives, then name a book that sounds like it.
Continuity: the small facts
Eye colour, the surname, the scar, who knows the secret and since when. Nobody abandons a book over the wrong hair colour, but they do stop believing the author is paying attention.
Spell every proper name exactly as it should appear.
Names, places, invented terms — and the plural of each invented term.
Who knows the central secret, and from which scene?
Keep this entry current above all the others. It is the fact that rots fastest.
Which physical details have you already committed to on the page?
What did you call something the first time that you have since started calling something else?
Decided, and still open
The things you have already settled and do not want to reopen, next to the ones that are genuinely still open. Without the split, every writing session relitigates the same three arguments.
What is decided and must not change, whatever later idea turns up?
What is still undecided, and by when does it have to be decided?
"Before I write chapter nine" is a deadline. "Eventually" is not.
What have you already tried and rejected, and why?
This is the entry you will thank yourself for in four months.
Filling this in is an afternoon of work, and keeping it true costs a few minutes after every scene — that second part is the one that quietly stops happening, which is why most story bibles describe a book three chapters out of date. Bloomwright builds the same document out of a conversation about your story, and keeps it current while you write.