Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms. She writes weird books for teens in lots of weird genres like, fantasy (Blood of Kings trilogy), science fiction (Replication), and dystopian (The Safe Lands trilogy). Find Jill on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, or on her author website.
This is my last post on storyworld building. What an adventure this has been! So, how do you keep track of everything? There are many ways. And what works for one person might not work well for another.
Some people refer to this “keeping track” as creating a story bible. The idea is to keep everything in one organized place where, when you need it, you can find it.
For my Blood of Kings books, I used a huge three-ring binder to keep track of everything. I added dividers for each city on my map and for other things like characters and research. I put my most important slips of paper in the front. And when I needed something, I’d go searching through the binder until I found it.
The process works. And I used this process for my Mission League books and my Safe Lands books. But I have learned that it’s not my favorite method. Sometimes I just can’t find that one piece of paper that I so desperately need. It’s just lost. And it makes me frazzled.
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| My Blood of Kings story bible |
I’m trying something new with my next series. I’m creating a book guide in Microsoft Word 2010, mostly because I’m obsessed with Word’s “find” function. I figure that I can find something a lot faster with the help of a computer than I can by leafing through a massive binder and piles of papers that have yet to make it into the binder. I got this book guide idea from Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Excuses podcast, so I give him full credit. If you want to listen to the episode where he talks about story bibles and his book guide, click here.
Here is a screen shot for my Word story bible/book guide for my newest work in progress that I’m tentatively calling Land’s End. I created a section for history, setting, magic, religions, plot, and characters, formatting them as Heading 1. Then I use the other headings to make sub-headings. And I can click from one to the other quickly by using the navigation menu on the left. The red circle in the middle shows you where to change the heading types. The red circle on the right shows you where to click on “Find” to bring up the navigation menu (which appears on the left-hand side of the document in the picture). And the red circle on the left shows you where to click to browse the headings in your document.
So I can put all the same information into this Word book guide as I put into my 3-ring binders. I can even paste in images from the internet, write out descriptions of characters, save the rules of magic or religions. I can add multiple books. I can keep it all here and click between heading or use the “find” function to find what I need. I can save a lot of trees too as I always print too many things.
These aren’t the only ways to keep track of things. Another thing I like to do is make a Pinterest board for the project. Then I can pin everything I want to that board so that I can easily find it again and so my readers can see what I’m up to.
Some people love to use Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Pro software to keep track of their book information. You can learn more about that by clicking here.
Some people enjoy Wikidpad, which allows you to create a Wikipedia-like file for your book where you can link between articles. Click here to learn more.
Some of my friends love Scrivner. I’ve never tried it, but authors have raved about it. Learn more by clicking here.
How about you? How do you keep track of everything? Have you used any of the methods I’ve mentioned in this post? What do you like best? Have I left anything out? Share in the comments.