However, you will be treating this as the Holy Object it is. The Bible to which I refer is, of course, your notebook. In this book will be EVERYTHING that you need to write your stories or novels — hopefully ending the dreaded writer’s block forever.
How you arrange it can vary according to your whims. Will you divide it neatly? This way allows you to have sections for your chapter titles, characters and their descriptions, snippets of dialogue and exposition, story ideas, any notes or questions that you need answered, any further research that must be undertaken. All easily findable and actionable. The drawback to this method is that it can be tricky to maintain; you have so many divisions that you find yourself on Volume Three before you have even written a word.
Or you can choose to write it all jumbled together — however it occurs to you at the time. The drawback for this one is obvious: you spend an awful lot of time just trying to find the relevant information, it makes it… interesting, leafing through page after page, trying to find the perfect piece of dialogue that you know is in the book somewhere, because, let’s face it, we writers are wordy buggers and we ALWAYS write more than we need for any given story. The simple solution for that is to invest in a big tub of multi-colored paper clips. You will have an idea of where your story is going by the time you have finished taking your notes, writing your bibs and bobs, and this will give you a rough idea of what is in each chapter.
At the END of each writing session, take out your tub of paperclips, go through your bible and mark out each chapter’s contents. How you do this is also up to you, but I would suggest assigning one color to dialogue and exposition, and another to any research pertinent to the chapter.
Just don’t get too fancy and assign a different color to each character, or to each and every related event. This way madness lies! Keep this method to the bare minimum and you’ll have good results.
Other things that can be included in your bible are pictures (culled from magazines or online) of your characters and the settings for your story. This works best if the notebook is dedicated to only one book, or series of books containing the same characters. Otherwise, you could take a break from writing and your character goes from a blonde to a redhead in the blink of an eye. #beentheredonethat.
Notes from reference sources do have to be treated a little differently to the bulk of the contents in your bible, and again, this depends on whether you are writing fiction, or non-fiction.
For non-fiction, you will need a bibliography, and for this you will need to have the work cited properly. This will involve having the quote in quote marks (for a short quote), followed by the author’s name and the title of the work, along with the page number/s and publishing information. Longer quotes are usually indented from the main text, and require no quote marks. However, if your work contains many quotes, then you may have end notes, where all of the sources cited are gathered together at the end of the document. BUT… make sure that you have the quote assigned to the correct book — or again, madness will ensue!
Fiction, however, is a little kinder; you aren’t going to be quoting slabs of text (or you shouldn’t), and you won’t be formulating an argument for peer review. In fiction, you will be using your research as background.
One famous example of NOT ENOUGH RESEARCH, involves George Lucas and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Han Solo makes the proud announcement concerning the Millennium Falcon being able to make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. This was in 1977. Fast forward to 2018, and the movie Solo: A Star Wars Story… George Lucas retrofits his error by having the Falcon slide into some kind of subspace dimension which contains a short cut… because if he had done the proper research, he would have discovered that a parsec is a unit of astronomical distance, not time.
As everyone knows, distance is immutable, time is not. To quote Douglas Adams in the Hitch-Hikers Guide To the Galaxy:
“Space” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” [Chapter 8, Page 62. Pan Books Ltd. 1979]
Next time I’ll be continuing on this theme, where we are going to expand your notebook into a veritable encyclopedia of “bits”, “pieces”, and everything else required for you to build your own fictional Universe.
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