Lore & LilacNotes for your future self: placeholders and a living story bible
Mark what you don't know yet, record what you've decided, and leave yourself a trail you can actually follow at revision time.
Loading the guide…
Related glossary terms
- Story bibleA reference collection recording the established facts of a novel, such as characters, places, objects, rules and timeline, so they stay consistent from chapter to chapter.
- Style sheetA running record of one manuscript's spelling, capitalization, naming, number and formatting decisions, used to keep it consistent.
- Continuity errorAn inconsistency within a story, where a detail established in one passage contradicts the same detail somewhere else.
- Discovery writingDrafting without a detailed plan and finding the story's shape through the act of writing it, sometimes called pantsing.
- Naming conventionsThe consistent patterns used to name people, places and things, so names fit their cultures and are easy for readers to tell apart.
- BackstoryEverything that happened to a character before the novel begins, which informs the present story whether or not it appears on the page.
- Revision passOne read-through of a manuscript focused on a single kind of problem, such as structure, continuity, dialogue or line-level polish.