How To Create A Series Bible \\ How To Plan And Write A Series, Video #4

hey everybody and welcome back to heart breathings you are watching video number four in my how to plan and write a series series of videos and today we're going to be covering a really fun and interesting topic that i know a lot of you have questions on which is how to create a series bible i actually have a previous video on this topic but we are going to go much more in depth today so i hope you're excited for this content just keep watching i really am so excited to introduce you to some ideas about series bibles today what we're going to talk about is basically who needs a series bible and why do you need one we're going to talk about the different methods of tracking and then we're going to go into what types of things you need to track in your series bible and give you some tips to make your series bible experience a better one and then the final piece of this video is going to be a discussion on how to actually use your series bible once you have it created so if this is an interesting topic to you and you're grateful for this content please go ahead and hit the thumbs up button make sure you're subscribed to this channel and hit the notification bell so that you'll be notified when new videos come up from me and let's dive in okay so first we're going to talk about who needs a series bible and why do you need one this is pretty self-explanatory but there is a lot of area covered here in terms of how complex your series bible needs to be if you are writing a series of books particularly a series of fiction books you need a series bible it can be something as simple as a sheet of paper or a small notebook or a simple google doc if you are not writing something super complex and there's not a lot of moving pieces in your series or a lot of books in your series so for example if you're just writing a three book series and you're going to be writing it very quickly so you're not going to have a lot of information to track and it could be a pretty simple like one pager type series bible but i find that if you're writing a longer complex series where you've got a lot of different cases or 10 different books to track or you have a lot of different characters you need a series bible and it needs to be super organized now every person is going to be different in terms of how much they want to put into their series bible and how much they want to track but there are a few things that are super important to keep in mind for when you're creating your series bible so we're going to go over those but long story short if you are writing a series you need some kind of way to track the facts of your series because as you're creating your world there are lots of things that are going to change and shift and you'll keep it in your mind that like oh yeah i'm pretty sure she had two brothers or two sisters and when you actually go to edit that novel maybe you cut that brother and you forgot about it and now this character only has one sister and you go you finish you publish the book and then maybe you're working on multiple things or maybe you had a baby or maybe things are happening in your life and it takes you six months to get back to write book two well if you don't have some kind of document that says here's the facts of the book here are the things that actually went into the novel or the previous five novels these are the story canon then your mind is potentially going to get all jumped jumbled up with the things you were brainstorming the things you put in the story and cut out it happens all the time and in fact my husband who is someone who is my first reader and he reads pretty much everything i write but we also brainstorm a lot of things years down the road since i've been working on my shadow demon saga for 10 years he'll be like well didn't jackson do such and such and i'll be like no not in the actual books we talked about him doing that but it never actually made it into the books so as writers we have a lot of potential story lines and things in our minds so it's important to actually keep some kind of record of what the truth of the story is what are the facts what actually got published in the books because it's too difficult there's too much to keep track of to just expect yourself to remember every tiny little detail if your characters go into a diner in book one that has blue seats with a red stripe in it you know when that character goes back and revisits that diner three books from now and three years from now when you're writing it in your head you might be able to convince yourself that it was a black seat with a red stripe and you'll just write it that way and if you don't have some way of tracking or checking in on yourself then you're going to have a lot of inconsistencies because you'll just write those diner chairs in as black with a red stripe now maybe that kind of thing doesn't matter that much to the story but it is actually important to your story world that things stay consistent i know i personally have made way too many consistency errors with like simple things like eye color or not remembering that i mentioned something in a book previously because as i was first getting started i did not have a good series bible and so this is something that i really take seriously now because it's something that it takes too much time to go back and re-read 10 books or a million words worth of story world when all you really need is a document and it does take time and it is complex if you have a big story world but it's very important and it can be super helpful and save you a ton of time in the long run especially if you're writing a big complex series now when it comes to methods of creating a series bible this is going to be as varied as the number of writers that are out there everybody has their own system or their own way of tracking stuff but what i'm going to do is i'm going to give you some examples of series bibles that are out there and i'm going to tell you what i think is most important when it comes to an effective series bible so one of the most effective things or one of the most important things about a series bible is that it becomes easy to search so whether you're doing it in a binder or on a web page or in some kind of software or program it needs to be searchable so if you're doing it on paper have tabs or have some kind of color-coded system or dashboards or something to where you can easily say well here's the section where i talk about characters or here's the section where i cover all the different places in my world so that when you're writing and you have that story question about what color were the seats in that diner you can just easily go to that tab turn and find the section i started out in a binder like that where i was trying to organize all of my things and hand write them and washi tape and make them pretty and you guys know if you've been following me for any period of time that i am a paper product kind of person i mean you can just see it all around me i love to keep track of things in on paper but when it comes to a series bible this is something i demand of myself that i do digitally because it is so much easier to just go into a webpage that has a little search box and say diner and then it pulls up every instance in your series bible where you have mentioned that there was a diner and it can be very easy to see and find what you need and when it comes to doing the like nitty gritty work of researching consistency in your story and making sure your facts are straight having that search box where you can just go in and it pulls up every instance is magical and i highly recommend doing it digitally but you don't have to just make sure that your system is searchable in some way and it has an organization to it another important thing that you want to think about when you're creating your series bible and deciding how to create it is you need to make sure that it's easy to access so if it's a giant binder that or like a series of binders that might be something that's difficult to take with you when you go on a writing retreat or when you move and hey truthfully not to be down on paper planning because i know a lot of people use series bibles in binders but it's also easy to lose something like that i mean i have moved several times in the last couple years we're gonna move again this year if i had to keep track of that one series bible or a series of binders i would be a nervous wreck because that's a lot of pressure to put that much time into something that can be lost either just because you misplaced it or i have been through two total loss house fires and i have lost enough stuff that way to be devastated if i lose it so another thing to think about but it needs to be something that's easy to carry around with you if you go riding out places or that's easily accessible to you wherever you are for this reason i like to use a web-based type of tracking system so i personally use a private wiki and i'll talk more about this in just a minute but one of the things i love about the private wiki is that it's accessible not only to me but also to my beta readers or to anybody that i want to you know to give my login to so it's just a simple thing as long as i can pull up a web page i can pull up my series bible the cons to that of course are that everything is easily accessible so if someone were to get a hold of your logins there would be all of your story information including potentially like future story lines right there for people to see so if you are someone who is nervous about that kind of thing and having it too accessible you might not want to do a web page based series bible it's totally going to depend on your comfort level and in a similar note there it's just it would be great if it was something that was difficult to lose um so that's one of the reasons that i like writing in google docs or using a private wiki is because it's if my computer dies i'm not going to lose all of my wiki stuff it needs to be something that can be easily backed up or photocopied or whatever it is but try to have some kind of redundant copy or to be keeping it in a place where it's not going to be easily lost because you don't want to put years of work into a series bible and then have something happen like a glitch on your computer and your whole bible is gone so let's talk about the different methods and like i said there are probably a lot more methods even than what i'm going to cover here so feel free to share a different methods that you've used in the comments one that we've talked about of course is a notebook or binder system so i know there are many authors out there and this is how i started out is with a binder system when you do this you just need to kind of decide what your organization system is going to be so that you can make it as easily searchable as possible if it just ends up being a bunch of paper stuffed in a binder it's going to be very difficult to find the information and the facts you're looking for and you might as well not have a series bible anyway so if you are going to make one that is on paper just make sure that it's easily searchable and very well organized there are a couple other authortubers and friends of mine that have videos up here on youtube about how they are creating their series bible in a binder so i'm going to link some of those down below for you as well i personally moved on from using a binder system to using a private wiki now a wiki if you think of it as like wikipedia right so this is basically a web-based thing i don't even know it's a web-based wiki i don't know what else to call it's not software but it's just a web-based organization system of files and what i love so much about using a wiki is the fact that it is super super easy to set up you just basically go in and you can create a page for everything you need and it's super easy to cross reference and link between pages so i talked about this on my previous video so i won't go into it too much here but one of the things that i love the most so let's say i want to create one page in my wiki for every character that appears in my story i can actually create a folder called characters inside a wiki then i can have a page dedicated to each character in my story on that page i can keep track of everything we know about that character their appearance their backstory any like common knowledge about them any phrases they often use their weapons their magic system their relationships and all of those kinds of things that are important to know about those characters but one of the other things that i can do is if i have a similar folder that's all about the places in this world so the shops the towns the countries the fantasy worlds the castles every little place has its own page as well what i can do is i can say you know harper lives in the town of peachville and is sent to live in a place called shadowford home for girls well when i write that out on the page i can actually link the words shatterford home for girls back to the actual page in the places folder that talks about that home for girls so it becomes this basically like spider web of information that makes things super easy to research when i'm going through and doing my research and due diligence to make sure things are consistent because i can be like oh she went to this place and i can just click on that place and it takes me to a whole page where i'm talking about that place and all the details and then inside that place it can be like and there's a waitress here whose name is gina and she works at this diner then i can click on the diner or the name of the person and i can read all about her history with that diner and i love that sort of interlocking linking system and that cross reference system because it is there's just no other system out there like it and it's brilliant and it helps so much another thing i love about wikis like i was mentioning earlier is that it's super easy to search once you have all of those pages set up and all of those folders set up inside your wiki there's a little search box at least in the one that i use at pbworks.com i will have it linked down below for you um there's a search box at the top and you can search for diner or you can search for shadowford home for girls and it will pull up every single instance just like it does when you search google it will pull up every time i have written the word shadowford home for girls inside that wiki so i can see all the instances of that phrase and i can easily choose and search to see and that search function is just really hard to be because it makes it so easy i don't even have to know where that information is located in my folder system because i've got a search and i can search for those keywords and terms and it pulls it right up it saves me hours of time i also just love the way that you can arrange things in folders and pages the organization system of a wiki is really flexible i love it i will also just throw in here too that another really good pro for using a wiki is that it can make things collaborative similar to why i love google docs which i've talked about before on this channel you can collaborate with other people so if you're writing a series with multiple other authors you can all have your series bible and all of your information on that wiki we did this with my willow harbor group when we created that series all of the facts of the series were right there so i didn't have to go back through juliana's series to see what her details were because all of her series information and the shops and the recurring characters were inside the wiki and it made it so much easier plus there was a map to reference and all these other things another thing that you can do later too is if you want to make sure that your book is being edited for consistency is you can have a beta reader go through and search your wiki against the facts in your next book so if i'm putting out book 11 in my shadow name and saga i could actually tag one of my beta readers and say hey i'm gonna give you my login to the wiki and every time you see a fact like somebody's hair color or the color of the seats or this type of necklace or this object that you've seen before just go in search make sure that it's the right color or the right fact you can pay them to do that or ask them to volunteer to do it but it might be a good way to just make sure things are consistent and it gives you that collaborative opportunity beyond that pretty much any place that you can store a bunch of information you can create a wiki inside of so here are just a few examples of places or software you could use to create a wiki so one note microsoft's onenote is something i know a lot of people use to create their wikis because you can also do color coding and folders and different things like that i am not familiar with it so i'm not going to give you a tutorial but i'll just let you know that if you go searching you can probably find some examples of people using onenote evernote is another thing that is commonly used for series wikis or series bibles so evernote might be something you would look like to look into i have heard many people say that they use scrivener so if you're not familiar with scrivener it is a writing software and it is something you actually download onto your computer and you can use it for your writing but a lot of people will also use scrivener documents for their series bible and they'll put images in and track their story arcs and everything else so if you have scrivener you can use that for your story bible or your series bible you could just do something simple that you already have access to like using google docs you could also use word the capabilities of google docs or words to actually interact with each other and do that cross cross page linking though is not going to be there so just keep that in mind when you create a google doc it will be searchable but it might be a lot of information to be keeping in one doc so if you have like a folder worth of documents they won't be able to talk to each other the same way a wiki can so just some pros and cons there as well a couple other tools that you might want to look into that seem really neat online is world anvil is one this is a site that i believe was actually put together for campaigns for like d d type campaigns so gaming like tabletop gaming and things like that where people could set up their characters and the rules of the land and the campaigns and all these things but i have a friend who uses world anvil for all of his fantasy stuff and it became a great place where you can keep track of your maps and your characters and what the races and creatures that you might come upon so if you're writing a big fantasy world you might want to check out worldanville.com and i will link that for you down below it's also in your how to plan and write a series workbook from the previous video another site that i stumbled upon that i saw some people using for a series bible type thing but also seems to have a lot of plotting tools inside is a website called hive word and in hive word you can track basically the story arcs and the plots of your books and then just kind of plug and play i again have not spent any time really like diving into this but i will leave a link for you down below if you're interested in kind of looking at another web-based story type tracker that's out there but like i said basically anywhere you can store information be it a binder or something physical be it a folder in a google drive or even just word or something like that you can use for a series bible but before you really spend a lot of time and let me tell you i've spent hours and actually thousands of dollars putting my wiki together because i paid someone else to create some wiki pages for me you want to make sure that you put some thought into what method you're going to use before you invest that many hours in it because it's not going to be easy to take a binder and make it into a wiki it's going to be like starting from scratch so before you start really put thought into how you want to do it and how you want to use it so that you make sure you're creating your series bible in the most helpful place for your individual needs okay so next we're going to talk about what to track in your series bible so like i said in the beginning of this video what you're going to track in your series bible is the facts of your world as a surprise bonus for you guys today if you are on my mailing list or if you join my mailing list there's a link for you to join down below i have put a new uh reference tracking sheet in the hb resource library that is basically just a list of all these things that you can and should track in your series bible and we're gonna go to it now and talk about all those things that you can track let's take a look at another free download that i have for you guys if you are on my mailing list this will already be in the hp resource library if you have not yet joined my mailing list you can sign up for it through the link down below i'll have a link to today's blog post where you can go and sign up for it and i will send you this series bible checklist as well as last week's how to plan and write your series workbook and a bunch of other resources how to plot a novel how to edit a novel i have a lot of resources and i keep adding to it so go sign up for that list come join us in the community and let's go through this it is not meant to be completely exhaustive so there may be other things for your personal story world that you want to track but there also may be a lot of things on here that you think okay i don't need to track that that's way too detailed so really this is a personal system you need to make some decisions about what your story world is going to depend on so just think about your own process and as you finish your first book in the series what when you go back to write book two what is going to be important to you what are you going to need to reference and if you're thinking about potentially writing a really long series what ten books from now are you going to need to remember about books one and two so give that some thought before you start because it's a lot harder to go back once you hit book five and start tracking characters that you didn't track in the first place it's so much easier if you do this as you go so really put some thought into what you're going to track so i'm hoping this checklist will help you so one of the first and most important things to track is characters and this can be every single recurring character in your book including the side characters so in your series bible lists things like hair and eye color their height so anything they wear typically or how they look any distinguishing marks tattoos features commonly used phrases and when we're talking about commonly used phrases this could be things that your character uses themselves like they're always saying gotcha or whatever or it could be something that is commonly said about your character so for example in the wheel of time there's always kind of a funny thing that happens between matt and perrin always think thinking that rand is good with the girls or rand always saying that parents good with the girls and it's just kind of a funny back and forth thing um or it could be something that everybody thinks this character is intelligent or everybody thinks this character is sly or slimy or oily or whatever but any commonly used phrases about your character or by the character and this can go for features like things that people notice first about your character or things that people um commonly associate with your character like he always has a certain type of expression on his face so these are types of things that are important to track you can also track their relationships their skills their backstory personality inner and outer desires like their passions their personal character arc for each book and we'll go into this in a template towards the end of this workbook and don't forget to track your villains too so you can get as detailed as you want in terms of how many characters you could track every single character that ever appears in the book or you could only track the ones that recur the most often it's up to you but it can be a good idea to add your villains in there too another thing to track is your story arc and book summaries so i like to create an overall page or section in my series bible for every single book in the series and the story world so on this page for example you might include a full summary of the book and you can have the main arc the subplots any story threads that are advanced the character arcs that occur in this book that are important the villains the relationship to the overall series arc how many words that book has the book cover any keywords you used when you published it you could even include links to that book at the various vendors you could include any type of like blurb that you use or add copy that you've tried you can get as detailed as you want here depending on how you want to use your series bible i love to have that overview page for every single book so that when i'm getting ready and preparing to write the next book in the series i can just briefly run through you know all previous six books and they're just getting a refresher of their character arcs their main story arcs the villains the twists the turns and things that happened which is so much faster than going back and reading all six books it gives you that good overview if you decide to use a color coding system for your stories this is also a place where you can include that key places and the setting of your story is also super important so this can be like i say here as broad as a section for the entire world like the continents or you know the cosmere if you're looking at brandon sanderson's stuff or in my case the shadow world so i could have a distinction for the shadow world versus the human world and then i could get as detailed and specific as peachville the town and then also have a page for the clearing in the woods outside of shadowford so you can get as detailed as you want and go as my new as you want depending on what types of locations or settings recur often in your story anything that comes up should be noted including the description any identifying terrain or landmarks you can even make notes here about the culture of a place any type of commonly seen weather businesses and buildings so i go so here i say if you mention the trim color on the heroine's house put it in your series bible because these are simple things that could come up when it comes to consistency later however this is one of those places when you're talking about plaque tracking things where you could go a little bit too crazy so if you're writing a romance series for example and you mention a lot of things about the heroine's house but you might never revisit that heroine's house because the next book is going to be about a different heroine it might not be worth your time to go through and create a detailed series bible page for the heroine's house because you're going to only reference it briefly if at all in the rest of the series however if you're writing a family saga and the estate that they live on is something that comes up in every single book you're going to want to make detailed notes on where the rooms are what the style of the house is what happens in each room what types of things are mentioned in each room so really just put some thought into how often these things are going to be mentioned in future books because your series bible should primarily be a reference material for you as you're writing subsequent books put some good thought into what you'll need to track and do your best to balance the time you spend creating your series bible against the time it would take you to research this later this is also a good section to include any maps even if you're just creating a rough sketch of the inside of the house or the floor plan or the the terrain of the country that they're in that sort of thing another thing you might want to track is organizations culture and the government in your town or your world how much of this you track is going to depend heavily on the type of series so if you're writing a small town romance you might not have any organizations that are important like shadowy organizations and the government might not be that important because it's just the same real world style of government that we have now however if you're writing a romance series the culture might be something that you want to mention maybe the entire series is set inside a business and the culture of that business is very important or maybe you're writing a southern small town romance where the culture in terms of the events that they have or the types of organizations that they have are a reflection of the culture of that town so that culture is going to be very different than a book set in chicago in 1920 so you're going to want to track some of that if it keeps coming up so this can be things like any ruling or mysterious organizations this could be the rules or laws in your world the culture the fashion any attitude of the ruling government or the attitude or general music and culture of the times just think about the hunger games so think of if she had not tracked how the world works the way the government is set up the culture of each district she would have had to go back to book one so many times checking to see what she had written originally so this can be something important to your series another important thing to track is magic systems and technology so with all magic systems there are rules right there's consequences to using it flaws or dangers maybe you have to use certain words to cast your magic when it comes to technology maybe there are certain things that are governing the ships or the types of weapons that are used or you know think about the matrix what is going on with that story world and how the machines are using humans as sort of batteries so what's really happening here in your world be as detailed as you feel you need to be so this could be referencing any tools that are used words important books ways of gaining knowledge just basically how does your world work consider tracking any objects of significance this can be an array of things and again you don't have to go through your books and like pull out every single object that's ever mentioned however if there's certain things that keep recurring or coming up like think about in the marvel series marvel universe the tesseract how many times do we see the tesseract and how many times does it show up and play a role in the story so many times so if nobody was tracking that then you might have lost track of who's supposed to have it in your timeline and that sort of thing so these are important things to track as well so this could be as detailed as a car or a certain box that's used some kind of totem or a book like a spell book that's used so you can add these to the timeline they can have just a quick note or an entire page but if you're going to reference it or it's going to recur in your story i would recommend tracking it and your tracking page could include an image in terms of what you think this item looks like another thing you might want to track is the language or dialect so this can be something you can just track on each individual characters page or on the culture page of your town but it could also be something that you have your own page to discuss the language or dialect you can also track separate timelines this can be as detailed as you want it to be but it should be something that you track at least on a superficial level even with a series that seems to be pretty sequential one you know or chronological it can still be important to track timelines this can be something that you want to keep track of in terms of villains or your character's backstory even if you're writing what seems like a contemporary world not super complicated story it can be important to track the timelines of when characters meet each other for the first time or when someone got married versus when someone else met their you know future spouse these things can all be important to know like this happened two years ago or this person left town five years ago and i would love to keep this on an actual like chronological timeline this can take the form of a simple list or it can be extremely detailed with like an entire history of your story world so make your series bible work for your own personal story needs finally i highly recommend keeping a style guide in your series bible so a style guide is basically a set of standards for how you style the text of your story so this can mean the way that you capitalize certain organizations or the names of towns it can mean how you use italics or it can mean how do you delineate the difference between a dream sequence or a text messaging sequence whatever you're using in your story it's a good idea to create a style guide for how you do this now i have seen style guides include things about characters too so your style guide might include just a quick reference to the eye color hair color height and build or whatever of each character and it can also mean how you use simple phrases or certain things that are tied to each character so this might not be as detailed as your character page but it might be just like a quick cheat sheet for referencing in this quick little pdf that i've created for you i also have listed out those helpful tips that i have for you um that we are going to i'm going to go over these in just a minute with you and then another thing that i have here is a sample character template and again this is something that i have just thrown together for you but you will want to customize it for your own series bible but what i recommend is that when you have something that you're tracking a lot of so characters would be one of them maybe objects would be another one or magic system would be another one to create a template of the things that you want to track about every character or every location every setting so that you're super consistent about it because if you don't create a template like this then what's probably going to happen is you're going to create a character for you know a page for jackson and you might track his hair color and eye color but you forgot to track his identifying marks or his you know common phrases or gestures and then when you go to reference the material you can be like oh i'm sure i've got his common phrases in there but you forgot it because you didn't have a template so this helps you to stay consistent and it helps to make sure that you track it's kind of like a prompt to make sure that you track everything you want to track so this is just some examples of what you might want to do but i suggest you create the template and then every time you create a new page for one of your characters you just simply highlight it copy it and paste it into your characters page that way you have the prompt to enter his eye color his hair color his height and so on so for your series you might want to specifically list out siblings or past people that they've dated or their best friends or co-workers and just make it your own to fit your series you could put their race you could put their allegiance if you have a lot of different organizations uh if you were writing something like the hunger games you could have their district number here any common phrases or gestures that they use or like i said things that are said often about them you can leave a section for when they first appear in your series any special skills abilities or knowledge that they may have so when it comes to this if you create a color code for your series then at the beginning when we first meet jackson maybe the only special skill we know about him is that he can draw the future so if i had book one was color coded in blue then the text i would write out here to the side would say can draw the future and i would write that in blue because i discovered that skill about jackson in the first book but let's say i discovered something about jackson later or wrote something about jackson in book three where we find out that he can see clearly in the dark so that's another ability or skill if book three was color coded to be purple then i would put c's clearly in the dark in purple on my sheet so that when i'm quickly referencing this i can see the progression of his abilities in terms of when the reader first discovered them or when the character himself first discovered them as well in terms of when they appeared in the novel so this is really where color code can help you you can also summarize their early life their experiences when they were younger where they lived who they dated what college they went to whatever is important to your story you can discuss their wound or their ghost which we've talked about before you can tell what this character is most passionate about or what their needs are but here i have just a brief explanation is that aft after this more basic information at the top you might consider creating a summary below this of every single book that this character appears in so after you copied this template you might want to say book one beautiful demons we first meet jackson blah blah blah blah and just give a summary of his character arc what happens in that book what relationships he establishes what skills he acquires and basically what is his role in that first book then below that you would write book two inner demons and you would say what happens with jackson in that book so that you have not only an overview page of the entire series of each book in the entire series but on each character page you also have a brief summary of that character's journey in each story now like i said before you might not want to do this much work for every single character especially if they're not going to be someone who recurs another thing you might want to consider when you're creating these character templates and your series bible is if you have cross world references so for example since we're talking about my character jackson from the shadow demon saga he also makes an appearance in my sacrifice me series so this is something that i would want to note here in the book summary section is that he appears in this other spin-off so sort of like buffy and angel which series did they appear in and where did characters you know often cross over to different series i recommend creating a similar template for any other information you commonly track like important places businesses objects skills timelines maps anything that you can think of so hopefully this download helps you establish your own process so that you can be more consistent i know it's a lot of decisions and sometimes it can feel overwhelming but again just remember that this is what you want it to be i'm giving you a ton of examples but if your series is not super complex when it comes to a lot of this stuff then don't worry about making your series bible super complex but the work you put into this especially if you do have a long running cross world series will be paying for itself in the long run because you'll have this amazing reference material that you can go back to and make sure that your story stays consistent and as tightly written as possible okay so now that we've talked about all the things that you want to track i'm going to give you some of my top tips for creating a really great series bible number one identify your priorities right from the start because my priorities with a multiple world multiple story 10 plus book series might be very different from you if you just have a trilogy my priorities are going to be to have something that links and that i can track lots of different information and put photos in and track a lot of different characters and cross world and stuff like that but if you're just writing a trilogy and it's very simple and it just features two main characters and a little bit of side stuff but you're never going to write side stories and all this other information your priorities probably will be very different from mine you won't need something quite as complex so one of the first things you should do is to really identify what type of series how long you think it's going to be how complex you want to make your series bible and just make a list of like here are my priorities here is how much time i want to put into it because when it comes to all things writing there is no one-size-fits-all method so you need to decide for yourself what's important to you another tip i have for you is to create a template of the common types of things that you're going to be tracking once you've created this kind of thing this kind of template all you have to do is copy and paste so when i add a new character to my series i copy and paste the template create a new page for them and i'm ready to roll another tip that i have for you is to color code your wiki or your system by book so if you have say 10 books in a series come up with a 10 book color coding system so that book one is always blue and book two is always green and book three is always purple then when you go in and you add text or you're adding you know using a different pen color or however your method is but like when i go into the wiki and i wanna go and change something i can create text that is purple for anything that i'm adding in on book three and then just make sure you have a key somewhere very accessible like on the home page of your series bible or in the beginning of your binder that lets you reminds you of that key so that when you're flipping through or when you're going through your information if something is written or highlighted in that purple color you know that that information came out in book three it makes it very visually easy to see where that information came in where this character first appeared where these two people finally had their first kiss what book did that happen in and so on so if you have a system that isn't as easy to color code then what you could do is you could create some other kind of code like what i did when i was first creating my wiki is i had a little tag per book so bd was beautiful demon's id was inner demons bitter demons which is book three was bid i had a kind of abbreviation system for the book so that if i needed to mark which book it happened in i would use that little code so come up with some way to distinctively say inside your wiki which book this occurred in because that can really help you later down the road another tip i have for you is to establish the rules and the process for creating your series bible so for example when i was talking about how you're going to organize your binder you don't want to just be throwing a bunch of papers in there willy-nilly it's the same way when you create a wiki or a word doc you don't want to just have well i have this character pasted next to a town pasted next to an object and then there's some magic system stuff over here and some magic system stuff over here decide before you get started what how you're gonna lay out your series bible so i'm gonna put characters in the front i'm going to have places over here i'm going to have the magic system in this section and how exactly are you going to track it what are your templates going to be what type of information are you going to track so sit down and actually plan out your process and your organization methods and then stay consistent with it again one of my main tips that i mentioned earlier is don't update your wiki until the book is complete and i would say that that story those story facts are canon so don't go through and update your wiki with information that has not been solidified yet if you just want to have future information in there like i think this is going to lead to this plot point then maybe choose like similarly a color code or a certain type of system to mark in your wiki that this is information that is not yet set in stone that way when you go back to do your research if you see this thing that says elena did such and such you can be like oh well that's written in blue so maybe that didn't make it into the story because i never finalized it have some sort of way to track that or do like i do what i do is when i'm planning everything goes in my plotting binder so this is the stuff that isn't yet canon it isn't yet solidified into the story this is just the planning then i go through once the book is through the editors through the beta readers and it is done and ready to be published that's when i update my wiki because it's going out to readers now it is solid fact in my story world that's when it gets documented in my series bible a final tip that i have for you is do as much as you need to do and track as much as you need to track to make your story writing more efficient and easy to search but don't keep from writing that next book because you're endlessly updating don't allow your series bible to be another form of procrastination or holding yourself back that's one of my final tips because you could spend years going through and creating pages and this whole back end of a spider web of information but none of it really matters if you're not writing the books and getting them out to readers so do the minimum you need to do to make your series bible work for you and then get back to writing okay in the final section of this video we're just going to briefly go over how do you actually use your series bible once it's created once you are getting ready to write the next book in your series i what i like to do is go back and reference my series bible and i will go into those story summaries and i will read through the summaries of the character and story arcs of the books that came before me if you don't track this in your series bible then you won't use this but if you have those summaries they can be really good to getting your mind back focused on where you are in the series that way you can see what breadcrumbs still have to be carried through what story questions haven't been answered and what happened with your characters in the previous book so it's a great refresher then i also will go back through my style sheet or my style guide and i will refresh my memory on how did i capitalize this how did i say this particular phrase was it italicized order of shadows was capital o capital s shadow demon was that capital s capital d or lower case and you just refresh your style guide on those types of things so that you stay as consistent as possible when you're writing the book which leaves for less work to do in edits if when i'm writing i come across something that i'm like i probably need to look that up i don't always like to stop the flow of words and go search for it sometimes i will but most of the time i don't i've mentioned this before in my editing video what i will do is i will mark that section or that piece of text with an xx in the text so i'll say something like jackson stared up at the three moons blah blah blah and then i'll think were there three moons or are there four or are there five how many moons are in the shadow demons then i'll put out in parentheses xx in my rough draft and then i'll just keep writing then when i get to either get home and i'm editing for the day or if i'm just done with the draft one of the first things that i do is i go through and search my document for xx and i go in find all of those instances where i put an xx and anything there that i can reference or research inside my series bible i will research at that point so if i get to this point where i mention the moons i'll say okay let me open up my series bible and let me search for shadow world or let me search for moon and i will find the answer okay there are four moons they come out at this here's the rules of how that works so this would work in jackson's case i will fix my document with the actual facts of the book that is a really great way to add consistency to your books but not take you out of the writing by having to like search back through 10 books to find that information then finally like i said if you are willing to give that password out to a beta reader or someone you even like an editor you pay to read for consistency then you can also use your series bible as a fact checker so this is something that i think is good to get in the habit of doing either yourself or paying or having someone else do for you especially when you're writing a really long series okay you guys that is a long and hopefully detailed and helpful overview of how and why you create a series bible what types of things you need to track where you can create your series bible and other methods that might help you and tips and tricks so i hope you enjoyed this i would love to show you my detailed series bible but there's just too much information in there that i do actually have some future plot ideas that are delineated with italics in my series bible that i just cannot show it so plus there's tons of spoilers in there for people that haven't read the book so i'm not gonna show my series bible but i will be soon setting up a series bible for my series the witches key when i go to start writing book two is when i'm going to set up that series bible so if you would like to see a walkthrough of the witch's key series bible make sure you like this video and comment down below and say yes i want to see a walk-through of the witch's key and how you set that up and i will be glad to do a video for you later this year when i set that fully up all right i hope that you enjoyed this if you did please sign up for my newsletter subscribe to this channel hit the like button and come join us for the rest of these videos the first three videos in this series are live now so i will include that playlist for you down below and in our next video we are going to be talking about tips for publishing and marketing a series so once your series is starting to be completed and you finish writing it how do you market it so we're gonna be talking about some best practices with that so i hope that you'll join me for that next video also if you're interested in publishing strategy and learning how to self-publish i do have a course that is open right now called publish and thrive that walks you through a to z of how to publish but also a lot of the mindset and marketing strategy that goes along with being a thriving indie author i would love for you to join me in that course as well as my hb 90 course which is a productivity course you can kind of see this kanban board over here where i teach you how to set goals and really go after your dream life so if you would love to join me in that i have some information in some links down in the description box below registration is only open until august 10th and i only offer this course a couple times a year so if you're interested go check out that information and come join us before the doors close on the 10th all right you guys thank you so much for hanging out i hope you enjoyed this video and i will see you in my next one bye [Music] you

Channel: Heart Breathings

Views: 10,722

Rating: 4.9900374 out of 5

Keywords: how to create a series bible, series bible, writing, authortube, writer, author, writing tips, bible, creating a series bible, writing advice, books, screenwriting, screenwriting advice, booktube, series bible examples, novel bible, digital series bible, write a book, how to, series, book series, template, how to make a series bible, what is a series bible, how to write a book, authors, writing a book, how to write a tv pilot, vlog, novel, series bible writing, series bible template

Id: wbxVUOefs4c

Length: 52min 42sec (3162 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2020