Creating My Series Bible
Most of you know that I finished my draft of the yet-unnamed sequel to Waiting at Jimmy's at the beginning of September. I wanted to update you all on what I've been working on since I completed the rough draft.Not long after I finished the draft, I saw a YouTube video from an author I follow where she talked about creating a "series bible" when writing a series. It's basically a binder or document where a writer can keep track of all the little details as they write a series: character descriptions, settings, family trees, daily and yearly timelines, world building, culture, politics/religion, backstories on each character, locations, symbols, music and samples of the way certain characters speak.Now, I thought that was about the smartest idea ever because there were a number of times while writing book two when I would search through multiple different documents or even the original book to double-check details.Creating a series bible means not having to waste time searching because all the details I need are in one place. So, I opened a new Word document and got started.My Characters section is by far my largest section so far because it includes a lot of different information about the characters: physical descriptions, character traits, likes and dislikes, life history, etc.Next, is a section dedicated to Setting. Each time I describe a setting, I add the description to this part of the series bible. That way, whenever I mention that particular location in the future, I don't mess up the details about what it looks like.One of the most helpful additions to my series bible is my Timeline section. The timeline of the story helps me track the pacing of the novel. It's basically a calendar with chapter numbers written on different dates to help track how much time passes between chapters and throughout the book.When filling out the timeline, it's helpful to know what events have happened in each chapter, which is why I have an Outline section. I'm not a super-detailed outliner (I'll tell you more about that another time), but I do write out a few ideas for each chapter and then update the outline once I've written the chapter.While the series bible document (which is almost 40 pages so far) will probably never be seen by anyone other than me, it's probably the most useful tool I have to tell these stories well.As a matter of fact, I went back through WAJ to create this series bible and ended up finding a number of factual errors that need to be corrected in my draft of the second book. Now I'm working on making edits and polishing book two so I can send it off into the world.