What is a lore bible?

The question usually arrives as "how do I keep track of everything I have invented?" The answer is a document with a specific shape, and the shape matters more than the tool.

A lore bible is the structured reference for the world of your novel. Not the story — the world. Every person, place, faction, rule and event you have decided exists, recorded as entries that can be found in seconds and trusted at eleven at night.

What it is

A working document, organised as entries rather than prose. One subject per entry: a character, a place, a faction, a magic rule, a historical event. Each entry is short enough to read in one breath and specific enough to be wrong — because an entry that cannot be wrong is not constraining a scene, and therefore is not doing the job.

The test: can you answer a specific question by reading one entry? "Which hand does Serin favour?" should be answerable from her entry alone. If the answer requires her entry, her mother's entry and the timeline, the granularity is wrong.

What it is not

It is not a prose history of your world. A twelve-page essay on the fall of the empire is a pleasure to write and nearly useless to consult, because the fact you need — the year the capital fell — is buried on page seven.

It is not a wiki for readers. Nothing in it is written for an audience. It is written for you, mid-scene, when the momentum of the draft is the only thing you can afford to lose.

It is not a one-time project. A bible written in a burst of enthusiasm before chapter one and never touched again is a monument, not a tool. The useful ones are lopsided and current: dense where the story has gone, sparse elsewhere, updated at the moment of invention.

Why fantasy in particular

Fantasy is the genre that most visibly punishes an unkept world, because it accumulates proper nouns. A character's name, a city's name, a house's name, a rule of magic, a calendar, a lineage — every one of them is a fact a later chapter can contradict, and the reader of fantasy keeps score. Eye colour that changes between books, a journey that takes three weeks in book one and four days in book three, a magic system that quietly acquires an exception because the plot needed one: these are the failures readers remember, and the ones they post about.

The failure is not memory. It is retrieval — needing the fact at the exact moment it is needed, which is the middle of a scene.

The entry template

The minimum that works:

Name: Serin Type: Character Summary: Captain of the river guard; lost her left eye at the Siege of Talor. Facts: Cannot judge distance; has stopped using a bow. Left-handed. Dislikes the capital. Links: Siege of Talor, the river guard, her mother Last touched: the scene where she aims

Notice what the facts are. They are not a description of what she looks like — they are constraints on what a scene can do with her. The scar is less useful than the fact that the scar means she cannot use a bow, because the second one can be violated by a draft and the first one mostly cannot.

Start with the entries the story has already forced on you. Do not build the calendar before you have written a chapter.

How big should it be

As big as the story needs, and no bigger. A working bible after a year is lopsided: some entries a single line, a few long because they earned it. That is correct — you built detail where the story went, and the rest of the world can wait until a scene needs it.

The size question is usually asked as "how much worldbuilding is enough before I start?" The better question is "what has the story already decided?" Record that, and let the rest be invented at the moment of need — then recorded, before you close the file.

Related

• Lore bible vs. character bible — when the smaller document is enough
• Lore bible examples from published fantasy — what Tolkien, Jordan, Sanderson and Martin did
• Building a lore bible you will actually use — the four structural habits of the ones that survive

And when the question is narrower — does this particular scene break what you have already written down — the lore consistency checker runs a scene against the facts you list, free and without an account.