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.

Three Kinds of Worldbuilding Lore

Novel lore falls into three broad kinds. Things you can point to one by one, like characters, places, and objects. A backdrop that belongs to no single thing, like the era or how magic works. And the story itself, like events and scenes.

In earlier posts, I settled how to store entries like characters and places in one template (part 2) and how to keep the same character from being created twice (part 3). But when I tried to store all of a novel's lore the way I stored characters, some of it didn't fit: the era, how magic works, and events and scenes. This post is about splitting lore into three kinds and giving each its own shape.

Each kind is found a different way

Above all, the three are found in different ways.

Things are found by name. They have names you call them by, like a character's name or a school's name, and the search keywords from part 3 catch their other names too.
The backdrop isn't something you look up by name. A story's era or how its magic works applies to the whole book, so you read it not when a certain name comes up but when the scene you're writing leans on it.
The story is hard to find by name. Events and scenes often have no name, and even when they do, you remember them by order and place, like “that fight in chapter 3.”

Since each is found differently, each needed a different shape.

Things go in a graph

Characters, places, and objects are tangled together. Who is whose mentor, which faction rules which city: that's what makes a story. I thought a graph fit these best, the way Obsidian links notes and draws those links as a picture.

The World connects nodes in two ways: links to other nodes inside section text, and the node relation properties from part 2.

I took this one step further. Node relation properties have names. Two nodes connected through a mentor property aren't just connected; they're connected as mentor and student. So I put the property name on the graph's line as a label. Looking at the graph, you see not only who is connected to whom but how.

The backdrop goes in a document

The era, the setting, the social order, rules that apply to everyone. These are awkward to put in any one character's or place's fields. Which node should hold “In this kingdom, mages rank above nobles”? You can't split it across every character either.

So the backdrop is simply a single document. In the World it's called the World Setting. It has no fields; you write in it like any ordinary document.

There's one rule to keep, though: anything that belongs in a graph node doesn't go in this document. Write the history of the magic academy at length in the World Setting, and it drifts apart from the magic academy node. The backdrop document should only hold what belongs to no single thing, so the duplicates I blocked in part 3 don't sneak back in another way.

The story goes on a board

Events and scenes didn't suit a graph. With dozens of scenes scattered as dots, you can't see what happened first. A story has an order: scenes sit inside events, and events inside larger arcs.

For this, I thought nested groups of cards fit best. Events and scenes become cards, and cards sit in order inside groups. I kept these separate from graph nodes and named the result a board.

I gave it its own way to search, too. Since you can't find these by name, you search by working down from the top through groups and order. When the agent reads a board, it doesn't search by name either; it follows the order of groups and cards and pages through a few at a time.

What a card holds is the same as a node, though. Cards have properties and sections too, and the node type decides the fields. Only the shape and the way you find things differ; the structure from part 2 stays as it was.

The next post is about a problem that came from the story moving forward. A novel doesn't stand still in one scene. A seven-year-old character grows up, secrets come out, alliances break. How to record those changes in a node was the next job.

I decided TypeTak would store things in a graph, the backdrop in a document, and the story on a board. The three differ in shape and in how you find things, but the fields inside them follow the same structure.

Frequently asked questions

How should I split up worldbuilding lore?

Splitting by how you find things makes it easy. Characters, places, and objects you look up by name; a backdrop like the era or principles that always applies to the whole book; and events and scenes you remember by order and place are best stored in different shapes.

What's the benefit of drawing a character relationship map as a graph?

Characters and places are tangled together, and who is connected to whom, and how, matters. A graph shows those connections in one picture, and putting the relationship's name on each line shows what kind of connection it is.

Where do I write lore like the era or how magic works?

A backdrop that belongs to no particular character or place is best kept together in one document. Anything about a particular character or place, though, belongs in that entry, so the same details don't drift apart in two places.

How should I organize the events and scenes in a novel?

You remember events and scenes by order and place more than by name. So rather than connecting them in a graph like characters, it works better to make them cards, group them, and lay them out in order.