Chapter 28 · The Project
Filling the Story Bible From a Draft
Most people arrive at the Story Bible with a draft already written, and nobody wants to retype a cast they spent three months inventing. Two buttons fill it from pages you have already written. One is free and literal, one spends an AI action and reads for meaning, and they are good at opposite things.
Two ways to fill it
Open a project and go to its Story Bible. Along the top of the board sit + New entry, then ⟳ Sync from script on screenplay projects only, then a dropdown listing every document in the project, then ✨ Populate from draft.
| ⟳ Sync from script | ✨ Populate from draft | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Screenplay projects | Every project type |
| What it reads | Character cues and scene headings | The prose itself |
| What it creates | Characters and Locations, names only | Characters, Locations, Items, Factions, with a summary and aliases |
| Cost | Free, instant | AI actions from your monthly allowance |
| Adds entries | Straight away | Only the ones you tick |
Both read the document named in the dropdown. It sits beside Populate from draft and looks as though it belongs to it, and Sync from script uses it too. If sync returns fewer names than you expected, check which document is selected first.
Sync from script
Press ⟳ Sync from script. The button reads Syncing… for a moment, the board repaints, and a message says what happened: Added 12 entries from the script. Nothing waits for your approval, because nothing here was guessed. Every name it files is a name you typed as a cue or a slugline.
Character cues become Characters, scene headings become Locations, and that is the whole of it. Items, Factions and Notes are never created by sync, and no entry it makes carries a summary, an alias or a detail. You get a named card and an empty inside.
What sync reads and what it skips
Cues are trimmed at the first bracket, so SARAH (V.O.) and
SARAH (CONT'D) both file as one character. Scene headings lose their prefix
(INT., EXT., INT./EXT., I/E) and everything
from the first dash onward, so INT. THE OLD MILL - NIGHT becomes
The Old Mill. One location, not one per time of day.
Three things are worth knowing about what it does with the text:
- Dual dialogue counts. Both columns are read, so a character who only ever speaks simultaneously still lands in the bible. See Chapter 16.
- Struck-through lines are skipped. Sync reads the version that would print. A cue you cut is a character nobody plays, and it stays out rather than having to be deleted later.
- Nothing is duplicated. Names are compared ignoring case against what the project already holds, so running sync every few days adds only what is new.
Names are filed in title case, which is kind to THE OLD MILL and unkind to
MCBRIDE, filed as Mcbride. Click the card and fix it. A later sync sees your
corrected McBride as the same name and leaves it alone.
Populate from draft
Choose a document and press ✨ Populate from draft. The button reads ✨ Reading… while it works, then a panel appears above the board: Storskarvia found 12, pick the ones to add: and one tickable row per suggestion, each with a name, a type, and a one-line summary drawn from your pages.
Every box arrives ticked. Untick what you do not want and press Add selected. Dismiss throws the panel away. Nothing reaches your Story Bible until you press Add selected, which is the point: this path reads for meaning, and reading for meaning can be wrong in a way that reading a cue list cannot.
Suggestions matching an entry you already have are filtered out before you see them, across the whole project rather than the one document. If everything it found is already filed you get No new entities found, your story bible already has them.
Two limits shape what comes back. It reads the first 16,000 characters of the document, roughly the first 2,500 to 3,000 words of prose, and proposes at most 40 entries, most significant first. A novel kept as one document per chapter populates well. A novel living in one enormous document gives you its opening cast and nothing else. Aliases come back too, up to six an entry, which is what makes a nickname in your dialogue resolve to the right person. Chapter 27 explains what they then do.
What populating costs
Populate from draft calls the model, so it is metered like every other AI action. The price is the length of the document: one action per 10,000 words, rounded up. A 6,000-word chapter costs one, a 24,000-word novella three. Your monthly allowance goes first and a prepaid top-up covers the overflow. Run out and you get You've used all 20 AI actions on the free plan this month.
If the model call fails you are refunded and told so: Detection failed. You weren't charged. Try again. A run that finds nothing costs the same as one that finds forty, so on a draft full of names an empty result is worth a second attempt.
Two other stops exist. Twenty populate requests an hour from one address returns Too many attempts, please wait a minute and try again. An unconfirmed email address gets Please verify your email first, we sent you a link, which gates every metered AI action.
Choosing what to keep
These come from a reader who has seen 3,000 words of your book, and they go wrong consistently: a walk-on with a name gets a card, a narrator addressed only as "you" does not. Untick the spear carriers. An entry holding nothing but a name makes the continuity editor's job harder, because a large cast crowds out the entries carrying detail.
Summaries arrive grounded in the text, describing role, appearance and relationships as your pages state them. Treat them as a starting point for the Details that checks compare. Prose in a summary is not something a check can hold your draft to. Eye colour: green is.
What you still have to do
Neither button finishes the job. Sync gives you a correct list of empty cards, populate a shorter list with a sentence in each. What changes how much the staff can catch is opening every entry and filling in details, covered in Chapter 26 and Chapter 27. Details turn the continuity editor from open mode into grounded mode.
Nothing keeps the bible in step with the draft afterwards. Renaming a character does not rename their entry, and neither button prunes anyone you cut. Run sync again after a heavy rewrite, then read the board and delete the departed by hand. Chapter 18 covers the rename. Part VI covers what the staff does with all of it.
When it does not behave
"Pick a screenplay document." The selected document has no structured content on the server for sync to read. The usual cause is a zero-retention document, whose server copy is purged after every successful sync to your cloud, and Sync from script does not fetch it back. Populate from draft does fetch it, so use that one there.
No "Sync from script" button at all. The project is not a screenplay. Series, stage play, audio drama, video and novel projects have no cues and sluglines to read, and get Populate from draft instead.
"Write a bit more first, there's not enough text to pull characters and places from yet." The chosen document holds fewer than 40 characters once struck-through text is removed, usually a placeholder created with the project.
"Could not add that one." Adding works through the ticked list one entry at a time and stops at the first failure. What went in stays, the rest does not, and the panel closes. Running again costs another action, and the names already added are filtered out of the new suggestions.
The panel vanished before you finished. Dismiss discards the suggestions and no history of a run is kept. Nothing is lost from your draft, and seeing them again means paying for another read.
Sync added a location you do not recognise. Look at the scene heading it came from. A heading typed without a recognised prefix keeps the whole line, and an odd entry is nearly always an odd slugline.
Updated 2026-09-04 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?