Index

A collection of tools and methods for writing long fiction. These guides are short and specific, meant as a set of things that hold up over a whole manuscript rather than an exhaustive survey.

This collection is put together by Gustavo Fior, who keeps it as a record of the tools he uses in his own writing and recommends to other people working on long projects. He has been writing fiction for years, across his own projects and a few larger books besides, and has worked through most of these tools along the way.

Every tool named here is set up against the same test manuscript, a three-book series with 60 named characters and a 400-year backstory, so the comparisons mean something.

Story Bibles

• What goes in a story bible. A story bible is a contradiction detector, not an archive. Here is the minimum that earns its keep, and what to leave out.
• Keeping a series consistent across books. Book three contradicts book one because the facts were never separated from the telling. How to structure a series bible that survives.

Characters

• How to track character relationships in a novel. Why a cast list stops working around thirty characters, and the tools that turn a cast into a navigable network.

Software

• The best software for organising fantasy novel lore. Seven tools for keeping a novel's lore consistent, what each is best at, and the tradeoff each one asks you to accept.
• Collaborative writing platforms for shared worlds. What actually breaks when two or more authors edit one fictional world, and which platforms handle it.