Write a long novel with AI and the lore you set up early keeps blurring. To fix that, I built TypeTak's lore dictionary, the World, and I'm writing up what I weighed and chose along the way, one post at a time.

What Does a Story Bible You Actually Want to Open Look Like?

A story bible's screens are where writers find, skim, and fix the lore they've organized. However well the lore is organized, if it's a pain to open, writers end up relying on memory instead.

Up to the previous post, I decided what to store lore in. Things went in nodes, the story on a board, and what changes in spans and progressions. This last post is about the screens: making that story bible something writers keep wanting to open.

Good answers already existed

How best to show organized information already has answers that many tools have refined over years. Writers are used to those screens, too. So for screens that do the same job, I thought it made more sense to borrow from the product that does that job best than to invent something new.

• The picture of how lore connects comes from Obsidian. Notes linked to each other, with those links shown as a graph: the most familiar shape there is.
• The shape of a single lore page comes from Namuwiki. Short facts in a table, longer stories in body text.
• Events and scenes come from Notion. Cards grouped together and laid out in order, later filled out with ideas from Novelcrafter.

When the shape is familiar, writers use the screen right away without having to learn it.

Questions no other tool had to answer

Some things couldn't be borrowed. Properties set by a type, a span on every value, progressions inside sections: these were new concepts in the World, so there was no screen to take as is. For these, I looked for new answers by picturing the moment a writer opens that screen.

Who was this character tangled up with again?

When writers open a character, they want more than the profile. They also want to know who that character is connected to and how. So in the top right of the node screen, I put a relationship graph centered on that node. While you read the profile, the relationships stay in view beside it.

When you want to look around your whole world

When you share a World publicly or just browse it, a table with properties laid out in columns is hard to take in at a glance. It's good for comparing, not for browsing. So I made cards the default for the node list. Each card holds only the name and a few key properties, so just skimming them shows you the world. A shared World always appears as cards, and you switch to the table only when you want to compare closely.

17, then 19. When did that change?

A single property field holds more than you'd think. There can be several values for different periods, each value has a span, and numbers can be written as an approximation like ≈ 17 or a range like 17–19. Cram all that into one input and you can't tell what you're editing. So clicking a field expands its values below it, and you edit each value separately, span included, right there. The more values a field collects, the better this works.

What's been happening with this character lately?

The star of a section is the character's traits; the progression is the record alongside it. If progressions stand out more than the text, the character description gets buried under a list of events. Hide them, though, and you lose track of how far the story has come. So progressions sit under a single “Progression” label line, with only the recent changes visible right away. Open a node and you see the latest seven lines; once there are more, they split into pages and you page back through the earlier ones.

What I learned building them

Building these screens taught me one thing: a screen that looks right and a screen that solves the problem are not the same.

Screens that look right come to mind easily. A table with properties neatly laid out in columns is one. Twenty characters as rows, with age, affiliation, abilities, and personality as columns, looks tidy at a glance. But characters in a novel each have different details pinned down, so the table ends up mostly blank. For a writer who wants to look around their whole world, those blanks took up space with nothing to read.

So when building a new screen, I looked for the question before the shape. What is the writer asking the moment they open this screen? If that question gets to the heart of things, what the screen has to do narrows down on its own. The question also decides what to show first and what to push back. Making the screen look good could wait until after that.

Frequently asked questions