Let’s talk about bibles. Specifically, story bibles. What are they, why do we use them, why might we NOT use them, and what tools are working for us?

Howard again plugs wikidpad, which he converted Brandon to, and which Dan Wells just couldn’t bring himself to love. Dan uses several different Open Office files. The important thing, though, is that when we need to store information about the book in someplace besides the book itself, we write it down in our story bibles.

Dan talks about his new project, how important the story bible was for that, and what sorts of things absolutely have to go in there. Howard talks about the sorts of Schlock-tech that often end up

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: Freakonomics, by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner, narrated by Stephen J. Dubner.

Writing Prompt: Someone is a were-animal. Pick an animal that hasn’t been done. Were-banana-slug, perhaps?

9:40 through 10:10: Yes, we went kind of quiet there. Somebody kicked a cable, maybe?

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.
Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.
*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Use the tool that works for you and your project. Consider the scale, who needs to use it, what works for you. Story bibles can help you get the ending correct. They can help you avoid continuity errors. They can help you remember and keep track of all the details. Worldbuilding, and your story bible, need to match the story you are writing. Story bibles are where you infodump for yourself, to inform your writing. And keep the infodumps out of your books.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Season Five, Episode 34, Story Bibles.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Brandon] And I still have a cold. For those listening, it hasn’t been three weeks, we just recorded these in a row. So… no, no, I shouldn’t tell you that, it destroys the magic.
[Dan] Pay no attention to that man behind the Internet.
[Brandon] Oh, no, I have had the most horrible cold for the last three weeks. Yes, that’s what it is.
[Dan] He’s dying of the plague.
[Howard] Misery.
[Brandon] Feel sad for me. Send me Magic cards. They make me better.
[Dan] Don’t listen to him, he hasn’t played in months.
[Brandon] What! I totally play all the time, just not with you.
[Howard] If you really want to make Brandon feel better…
[Dan] Well, then don’t listen to him, he’s a jerk.
[Howard] Don’t send him Magic cards, send me fine cheeses.
[Brandon] Wow, okay. This is Writing Excuses, Begging for Crap.
[Dan] Season Five, episode whatever.

[Howard] Episode 34. So, Story bibles.
[Dan] Story bibles.
[Howard] We talked about worldbuilding and outlining way back in season one, and I think I introduced you, Brandon…
[Brandon] Yes. You converted me to wikidPad.
[Howard] To wikidPad. Which is actually pronounced wicked pad.
[Brandon] Oh, really? Wow. My whole world has just changed. Howard, you’ve led me astray all these years.
[Howard] Well, there were people in the comments who yelled at me for saying it wrong.
[Brandon] Oh, wow.
[Howard] Brandon, you never read the comments.
[Dan] It doesn’t sound as cool.
[Brandon] We have comments?
[Howard] Anyway, what I love about that tool, which I shall continue to call wikidPad so that you guys can find it, is that it’s a wiki that you can have on your hard drive, so nobody else is going to hack into it. You can manage all of your story, and if there’s something… if you’re talking about a character’s backstory, you’ve got a page for that character, and you then want to talk about another character… you then mention that’s when he met so-and-so. You can format…
[Brandon] You can hyperlink it right there.
[Howard] It as a wiki and you can hyperlink it straight across and write so-and-so’s page. Then when you’re going through and reading your notes, you’ve got those helpful hyperlinks in there so that you can find the information you need to quickly.
[Brandon] It’s really convenient. Although I will mention, I still don’t use wikidPad… or wickedpad… I don’t use it for my single novels. I only use it for large series. The reason being, it is a lot of work to set up one of these things and to jump around all that much. It’s perfect for you because you’re [garbled]
[Howard] [laugh] I’ve got 11 years of continuity, and I have recently sculpted the outline for the next probably eight years of Schlock Mercenary. I need that.

[PSA: WikidPad is freely available at http://wikidpad.sourceforge.net/ ]

[Brandon] Right. Let me ask, do your fans correct you if you ever make a mistake?
[Howard] My fans correct me when they think I’ve made a mistake, and that really frustrates me, because they’re not paying attention.
[Brandon] Wow.
[Dan] Take that, Howard’s fans!
[Howard] What kind of self-respecting fan will say, “Oh, this is a continuity error. You shouldn’t be able to blow Schlock apart with a firehose.” I’m sorry, a firehose has more force per square inch than the foot of an elephant, and we’ve already established that the foot of an elephant can splatter Schlock. So…
[Brandon] Wait a minute. I think we’ve touched a nerve there.
[Howard] Small nerve.
[Brandon] Small nerve.
[Dan] So there.

[Brandon] Story bibles. Dan.
[Dan] Let me come in really quickly and say that I tried wikidPad and it totally did not work for me. It’s a great tool that just did not fit my style whatsoever.
[Howard] What do you use?
[Dan] I use several different Word documents. Or at this point, open office documents.
[Brandon] That’s what I used to do, too.
[Dan] They don’t hyperlink to each other. But that’s just the way… I like the freedom of being able to just write without having to feel like this wiki program is wondering why I never hyperlink anything and why my organizational system is so poor. I don’t need that kind of pressure, computer program.
[Brandon] Well, and I that’s as that’s basically how I feel with the shorter… if I’m writing a single book. When I’m working on the Stormlight archive, I need to be planning for the next 15 years. So I need to have all of this organized in a format that not only I can use it but Emily and Peter can both use it can access all of this information in a rational way, and keep me honest. Which is why I needed that.

[Brandon] But let’s just talk about the valuable nature of story bibles. Most authors I know use them. Not everybody, but a lot of them use them. Even you, Dan, who…
[Dan] I do.
[Brandon] You’ve said before that you basically are a discovery writer, so why do you need a story bible?
[Dan] I think I’m probably halfway along that scale between discovery and outline. The places where I use the story bible is… well, for example, the series that I just finished… which I just found out is actually going to be announced, finally… so, yeah, we can talk about it. In fact, we might even be able to talk about it in this episode. But very quickly, I will say, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction thing that involves a lot of genetic engineering and a plague. So in order to make sure that I had the ending correct, I needed to make sure that I knew exactly how the genetics worked and I knew exactly how the plague worked, so I wrote page after page after page of notes, saying this is who did it, this is how they did it, this is how it works, this is why it works. That way whenever my characters are investigating the mystery, I can look back at that and say, “Okay, now they can find this clue.” Or “They can discover this inconsistency and figure it out.”

[Brandon] I think this basically becomes… and I might be wrong here but basically I think it becomes important as you’re writing a series. Because if you write a single book, you can read through it or have people read through it and find your continuity errors, self correct it, and you don’t need the bible as much. The bible is there for when you’re writing book number two and you say, “Oh, I’ve already published book number one. In book number one, what did it say about such and such?” Or “what did I foreshadow here and there?” But I’ve also… even when I’m writing a single book, I do generally keep a Word document where I’m reminding myself of all of these things because it’s just so much easier.
[Howard] I throw a lot of those things in an outline. I do a lot of my outlining just in Notepad. Sometimes, I will write a strip in which I realize, “Oh, this strip just made a promise to the reader. Huh, I need to remember that I wrote that.” So I’ll jump over into the outline and make a note of that. That never makes it into wikidPad. But it didn’t need to. On the other hand, when I’m writing about the effects of certain kinds of nanotech or the physics quote unquote of a carbosilicate amorph… so that I know what those rules are, I put those rules into the wiki so that I can consult them and I know how it works.
[Brandon] It’s keeping yourself honest, is really what it’s doing. Keeping yourself consistent.

[Brandon] How do you decide what goes in your story bible and what you just kind of let grow more organically, Dan?
[Dan] For me, because I think that the thing I always have to keep an eye on when I write is an ending… to make sure that my endings work. Everything else, I can just write as it goes. That’s what is fun for me, is to make it up as I go. But whatever is going to build toward the climax, and make the payoffs all work, that’s what goes into my story bible. Which is why for this other series, it’s the science, the genetics and the virus and everything like that. For… like you say, for the single novels… I just sold one called the Hollow City, which is just a standalone book. I didn’t really have a story bible at all because I knew where it was going and I didn’t need to keep track of all that different information.

[Brandon] All right. Let’s do our book of the week. Howard, you’re going to do it for us this week?
[Howard] I’ve got the book of the week this week. This is one of my favorite books. It’s called Freakonomics by Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner. One of them is a journalist, one of them is an economist. It’s a multiple New York Times bestseller, and there’s been a sequel. Basically what these guys did is took principles of economics and did all kinds of regressive analyses of things you wouldn’t expect statisticians and economics folks to look at. The subtitle of the book is The Hidden Side of Everything. It is a fun read. You find out how real estate agents are like… well, you find out a lot of things about real estate agents. One of my favorites is how Chicago public school teachers are like sumo wrestlers. The answer is they both cheat. Here is the statistics proving without any shadow of a statistician’s doubt why they are actually cheating. The reason I think this will be fun for you Writing Excuses listeners to have a listen to or to read in hard copy, is because those sorts of underpinnings are fantastic tools for worldbuilding. What ever system you’re writing. It’s going to be a fun, fun, fun research tool. Head out to audiblepodcast.com/excuse. Kick off a 14 day free trial, pick up a copy of Freakonomics by Leavitt and Dubner, and enjoy yourself.

[Brandon] All right. So, you’re building a story bible. Dan, how do you format yours? No, let’s ask Howard because you’ve probably got the most extensive one. How do you format it? Like, what are the different…
[Howard] Eeww. I started… my formatting has changed a lot fairly recently. I used to be very, very hierarchical in everything I did. It was all… you start at the top of the hierarchy, and the top of the hierarchy is, well, the universe, and then there are planets, and then there are people who live on planets. I realized that’s ridiculous. That’s not the way these things are connected in the minds of the readers. The way these things are connected in the minds of the readers are by relationships and motion. That means sit down and start writing. As soon as you write something that touches on another character or another place or something interesting, pop another page and write that. I started organizing it that way. It made it a little more difficult to find things at first, but it made it much easier to get the information down, and get it written. I did the same sort of thing with my filesystem. My filesystem now is much more organic. I can never find anything by trying to navigate directly to it. I have to pull up a search window and say will, “Listen, I know the file I’m looking for has this text in it. Where the heck is it?” In fact, the tool I’m using, wikidPad, will let me do exactly that. So I’ve got what I need.

[Brandon] So how much of this that you’re doing in your bible is done before you are writing a strip and how much is… while you’re writing a strip, you say, “Oh, I need to make sure to include this in the story bible?”
[Howard] The vast majority of it happens after I’ve written something. I will do an awful lot of reading… I’m getting ready to write a strip, and I think, “Oh, you know what, I really need to know what the politics are like on this world. I know I’ve written about it, I’m going to go read about it.” I’ll read. While I’m reading, I’ll link across and learn all kinds of things… relearn all kinds of things about my universe. Sometimes I’ll go in and change some notes because I’ll realize, “Oh, that piece is not canonical. It never aired in a strip. I’m pretty sure it never informed anybody’s dialogue. I’m going to go ahead and take the liberty of changing that right now because I don’t like it.” That’s a little dangerous, but…
[Brandon] Yeah. That is dangerous, but it is what you have to do sometimes. I would say, kind of thinking about this a little bit more, the difference between an outline and a story bible for me is, a lot of my story bible stuff comes while i’m writing or when I’m building in the outline. I’ll say, “Oh, I need to know this fact.” I would jump to wikidPad and I will write out an article for myself, like an encyclopedia article, just a few paragraphs long, on this fact, and I will set it in there. I will also sometimes canonize things and not canonize things. Like I will put at the top, “This is canonical. This is not canonical.” To tell myself…
[Howard] Oh, I’ve done that on all of my… like the rules of… the 70 maxims of maximally effective mercenaries…
[Brandon] Yes! Yes! That has nothing at all to do…
[Howard] Nothing at all to do…
[Dan] With anything.
[Howard] With the septuagenitally habitually challenged whatevers. The… that list. I’ve got I think 40… 45 items on the list. When I put a new one in the strip, I dive into wikidPad and indicate, “And this one is now canon” or I reuse a number and say, “Okay. This one that I’ve never used before was stupid and the new one is canon.” And I rewrite it.

[Brandon] Now, there is a little bit of danger of worldbuilding disease with this for me.
[Howard] Oh, heck yes.
[Brandon] Though, when we talk about worldbuilding, once again, I’ll reiterate the point, your worldbuilding needs to match the type of story you’re telling. If you are working on a big, massive epic, it’s more appropriate to spend a little bit more time in worldbuilding as long as you’re still doing your writing. So just kind of remember, this is a tool for you. This should not be a goal and aim unto itself. Dan, were you going to say something before I cut you off?

[Dan] Well, I was just going to talk about my format of story bible which is very different it sounds like from what you guys do. I went…
[Brandon] That’s because you’re wrong.
[Dan] That’s because I’m awesome. So I sit down to write, and I have several files on my computer all open at the same time. There is the document that I’m writing. There is my outline, which more and more often these days is done in a spreadsheet for some reason.
[Brandon] A spreadsheet?
[Dan] I do my outlines in a spreadsheet.
[Brandon] What, so you can add your chapters together? I mean, why?
[Dan] No. We can talk about that in an outlining podcast. But I have my outline open. That is… I never start writing until I have an outline all the way through to the end, so that I… again. This is all me, trying to make sure my endings work. Then I will have several other things open. So for example, in my… the cloning book that I was writing, the apocalypse. I’ve got one document open that explains all the different organizations, one open that has just a list of character names that I think are cool. Another one that has my cast of characters who… all the real people. And then another one that has a few notes on the science. So as I’m writing, if I come to one of the organizations, I can just click over to that thing and say, “Okay. This is what they want, this is who’s in it. All right.” Then I can write that section. If I need a new character, I look at my list of cool names, and I pull one off. Cut-and-paste it into the other one with my cast of characters, write some notes so that I remember who that character is, and now I will always know who my characters are.
[Brandon] It’s funny. I’ve seen that list of cool names, and they all say Dan Wells.
[Dan] I know. It’s really weird that that keeps happening. But it is, as I said, a cloning book. So those really are the five documents plus the actual book that I always have open while I’m writing. That’s specific to that book, but more or less true of anything that I write.
[Brandon] It is fun… fun? Useful to be able to switch between a lot of different documents for those purposes because they can help you. When I was writing early books, I would make all these things different documents, like here’s a religions document, here’s this document. I eventually transitioned to using the document map in Microsoft Word to do the same thing. So I could have that sort of pre-built outline on the side, where I could click and jump to things very quickly.
[Dan] I imagine if I ever do anything as epic in scope as the two of you do, I might need to do something like that. But for writing just a single book or a trilogy, this is working just great for me.
[Howard] I need to blurb that on the back of a Schlock book. Quote epic in scope close quote, Dan Wells.
[Brandon] And Dan Wells. And Dan Wells.
[Dan] Yes. Make sure to quote all of me.

[Brandon] Yes. Howard, any parting words? You’re the best at doing this. Pitfalls or foibles that you think people might fall into… that you have fallen into, that you would suggest to them to avoid?
[Howard] You know what… the stuff… Brandon, I love what you said about writing these articles to yourself. Those articles that you are writing, you are writing to yourself. I love that they don’t end up in the books. Okay. That’s… infodump for yourself. Infodump a lot for yourself. Put it in Word, put it in wikidPad, put it someplace. But infodump for yourself, and then let that inform your writing. That will feel very natural. Whereas if you worldbuild like right in your outline or right in your manuscript, you end up with these long, long, long paragraphs that we don’t care where that sword came from…
[Dan] You don’t have to look at me when you say long, long paragraphs we don’t care about. That’s why you’re not in my writing group, Howard.
[Howard] I was trying to make eye contact and engage you in the discussion again, but…

[Brandon] Dan. Writing prompt?
[Dan] Yes. Writing prompt.
[Brandon] Save us from long boring paragraphs.
[Dan] Okay.
[Brandon] Come on. Do it fast.
[Dan] Well, I had one until you threw me off. Okay. What I want you to do is write a story in which there is a…
[Brandon] A character doing something?
[Dan] A character that’s doing something. No. Someone is a were-animal that is the kind of animal you would never be a were-anything.
[Brandon] Oh? Good.
[Dan] We have werewolves and werebears and all that stuff. I want to see like a were-banana-slug, some ridiculous thing.
[Brandon] Okay. Well. This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, kind of. Now go write.