Chapter 26 · The Project
The Story Bible
The Story Bible is the list of who and what your story contains, kept in your own words. Nothing writes to it without you saying so, and nothing in it reaches your draft. It exists so the continuity editor has something to check your pages against, and so you can stop searching back through four hundred pages to remember which eye colour you committed to.
Where it lives
Open a project from the Studio and look at step 1, Develop. The Story Bible card sits there next to Outline and Research, with a chip showing either empty or the number of entries. Click it and you land on the project's story bible page, headed with your project title.
One Story Bible belongs to one project. Every document in that project shares it, which for a series means one bible across every episode rather than one per instalment. See Chapter 23 for how a series holds its episodes.
Entries are grouped into a board, one section per type, with a count beside each heading: Characters, Locations, Items & Props, Factions, Notes.
The five kinds
Every entry has a Type, chosen from the dialog. The type decides which section of the board an entry sits in, and which other tools will look at it.
| Type | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Character | Anyone with a name. The default for a new entry, and what the script sync and the quick-add button both assume. |
| Location | Places. A house, a city, a ship, a room you keep describing. |
| Item / Prop | Objects that have to stay the same object: a revolver, a locket, a car with a dent in it. |
| Faction / Group | Companies, families, armies, covens, anything with members. |
| Note | Everything else worth pinning down. A rule of your magic system, a pronunciation, a promise you made in chapter two. |
The Lookbook builds its boards from Character and Location entries only, so an item filed as a Note never gets a portrait.
What an entry holds
The entry dialog has four things in it, and one of them is required.
- Name. Required, up to 200 characters. Saving without one is refused with Entry needs a name.
- Also known as (comma-separated). Up to eight alternatives, each up to 80 characters. Type them separated by commas; Storskarvia splits and trims them for you.
- Summary. One or two sentences on who or what this is, up to 4,000 characters. It shows on the card and in the editor's hover card.
- Details. Label and value pairs you define yourself, added with + Add detail and removed with the × beside a row. Up to thirty per entry, labels up to 60 characters and values up to 400. The placeholders suggest the shape: Eye colour and Green.
A detail row with a blank label is dropped when you save, so an empty row you added and did not fill in costs you nothing. A row with a label and no value is kept.
Details are the part that earns its keep. A summary reads well; a detail is a value the continuity editor can hold your draft to.
Adding, editing, deleting
+ New entry opens an empty dialog. Fill it in and press Save. The card appears on the board straight away, filed under its type.
Click any card to reopen it as Edit entry. The same dialog, now with a Delete button at the right-hand end. Deleting asks Delete this entry? first, and takes any portrait generated for that entry with it, so a face you asked to be rid of does not stay on the server.
Two other buttons sit in the toolbar and both belong to the wider job of filling a bible from a draft you have already written: ⟳ Sync from script, which is free and instant and appears only on screenplay projects, and ✨ Populate from draft, which reads the document named in the dropdown beside it and proposes entries for you to tick. That second one spends AI actions from your monthly allowance, so it gets a chapter of its own rather than a paragraph here.
Nothing stops you adding the same name twice by hand. The two automatic paths both check what is already there before adding anything, but the dialog takes you at your word.
The Story Bible tab in the editor
You do not have to leave your draft to consult it. The right-hand rail in the editor has a Story Bible tab listing every entry in the project, grouped by type. Click one and Storskarvia finds the first mention of that name in the document and selects it.
Above the list are two controls. + Add from selection takes whatever you have highlighted in the draft and files it as a new character; the selection has to be a word or two, 80 characters at most, or you get told to select a name first. Open story bible → takes you to the full board.
Recognised names carry a dotted underline in the text, and hovering one shows a card with the type, summary and details. On a phone, tapping does the same and tapping elsewhere puts it away.
Why the continuity editor wants one
The continuity editor reads your manuscript against itself, and it runs in one of two modes depending on whether this project has a Story Bible.
- Open mode, on an empty Story Bible. Storskarvia works out the named subjects itself and flags anything given two incompatible values. A naked draft still gets a real check, and the Continuity panel tells you afterwards that it ran this way.
- Grounded mode, once entries exist. Extraction is aimed at the cast you have
confirmed, your aliases resolve to the canonical name so a nickname and a full name are treated
as one person, and every Detail you have filled in is entered as a claim in its
own right. When a detail and the manuscript disagree, the finding quotes the bible as
(story bible: Elena — Eye colour: green)against the sentence in your pages, so you can see which one is wrong.
That last part is why details beat summaries. Prose in a summary is not something a check can compare; Eye colour: green is.
Part VI covers the staff in full: what a check costs, how to read a finding, and why some findings are held back. For the writing habit rather than the software, the guide How to Keep Continuity in a Long Novel covers what is worth recording in the first place.
When it does not behave
"Project not found" on the Story Bible page. The page is owner-only. A collaborator with a share link cannot open it, sees an empty Story Bible tab in the editor, and has no + Add from selection button. This is deliberate: a share is one document and a Story Bible is the whole project, so sharing a chapter would otherwise hand over every character, place and secret in the book.
No "Sync from script" button. That button appears only on screenplay projects. A novel, series, stage play, audio drama or video project has no cues and sluglines to read, so it gets the dropdown and ✨ Populate from draft instead.
Save does nothing visible. It does not fail silently. If the entry could not be saved you get the reason, and the dialog stays open with your text in it rather than closing over a lost edit. The same is true of Delete, which says so rather than removing a card whose row is still on the server.
A very large cast. A continuity check names up to sixty entries to its reader as the known cast. Past that, an entry still resolves when your draft names it, and its details are still compared, but the reader has not been introduced to it up front. If a project has grown to hundreds of entries, the ones carrying real details are worth more than the ones carrying only a name.
An entry you cut from the story is still in the bible. Nothing prunes it for you, and renaming a character in the draft does not rename the entry. After a rename pass, update the name here yourself, or the continuity editor keeps comparing your pages to somebody who no longer exists.
Updated 2026-09-02 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?