I didn’t have a book bible until draft five of Winter’s Fire. Waiting so long to write one is not a mistake I will make again!

 

Whether you’re a plotter or a pantser – or somewhere on the scale in between – I would recommend starting a book bible before you start drafting.

 

If you’re a discovery writer like me, and often you don’t know a lot of the details about your characters and plot and world before your start drafting, building a book bible can be a daunting task and the templates I were pretty overwhelming and too rigid for my way of working, especially for the character building sections.

 

It also came to my attention, that many people felt the same way.

 

So I came up with my own, and it’s worked so well for my new WIP, that I thought it might be useful for other’s too.

 

For me, it has everything I need to record about my characters, world and plot. It grows as your story does and is set up to easily navigate between headings. You can fill in sections as and when you are able to, and as it’s in Word, you can easily add or delete sections that have no bearing on your story.

 

For the purposes of sharing, I’ve given a brief overview of how I use each section, and how the bible works as a whole. I hope you find it as useful as I have.