Fiction Scribe

When you’re writing, you no doubt look for things that work for you no matter whether you need it to work for your writing space or your novel notes. There are a lot of tips, tricks, and habits writer’s usually (supposedly) use which I don’t. So when I suggest things that might help you out, I highly encourage you to do something different from what I’ve suggested.

What?

Do something different from what I’ve suggested because that will make the tip, trick, or habit more personal, and you’ll be more likely to keep on with it. That being said, let’s move on to one of my essentials as a writer:

The Novel Bible.

What is a novel bible? Well, depending on who you are, it’s either that neatly compiled folder of everything to do with your novel with expaning folder sections and separate color coded categories, or it’s that stack of napkins over on the corner of your desk under the empty sushi container.

The novel bible is basically your reference book, created by you, to call on at any time when you forget anything. All of your notes, character sketches, research, scene sketches, etc.

What exactly goes in it? That’s your choice. I can only tell you what I have in mine. If you look down a little to your right on the screen, there is a list of categories. If you click on that and go to exercise three, you have what goes into the first section of each one of my bible’s: the character sketches. (I apologize to anyone who takes offense at the use of “bible” for this, but that’s what I was taught to call it.)

However, it’s all about what works for you and your habits. I don’t do that entire sketch for every one of my characters because I average probably about thirty characters per novel, if not more. I mainly do it if I have a lot of characters to deal with who are main facets of the novel. Otherwise, various character notes always do.

(Oh, I also always have a title page because I usually need one page to put all the random post-it notes on. )

You can seperate your characters however you like. My main categories are Major Characters, Minor Characters, Cardboard (Space Takers/Plastic) Characters, and OT (Only Talked About) Characters.

The next section is fairly easy but mostly something I use for note-type things instead of detailed sketching. Scene descriptions.

As I said, I usually just use this section for notes or brief summaries of possible future scenes, but you can do more. For the sake of experimenting, I tried writing a novella all previously plotted out with scene description templates like this:

Location:
Characters:
Introducing Characters:
Events:

I’m more not a sketch kind of woman than am one, but it did work, no matter how tedious I found it to be.

The next (and last, in my case) section is the notes and research section. Now, depending on how expansive or in-depth your novel is, you may want to consider breaking this up into two categories. I generally don’t, preferring to keep my notes in front and research in back of one section. The easy way.

What’s the point? A mistake some writer’s make is making Haley’s eyes blue on page 34 and then making her eyes green on page 115. You have to remain consistant in every little detail, so taking and keeping notes is important.

If there are any sections you have that I haven’t mentioned, let me know.