How I’m Using Notion To Build A Story Bible For Nanowrimo + My Original Template #Preptober

Hello, dear friends! I hope you are well and if not, I hope brighter days come your way soon. Today, I’m announcing that I’m participating in this year’s National Novel Writing Month and taking you on a tour of my “story bible” Notion template that I’m using this Preptober—plus, I’ve shared the template at the end of this post!

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SO WHAT EXACTLY IS A “STORY BIBLE”?

A “story bible” is what I call the Word document/binder/notebook set where I keep every single piece of information I need in order to write my stories in a cohesive manner. That means character, world, and plot building sheets and exercises go in the story bible, as well as my plot timeline (most people use notecards for plot timelines, but I worry I’d get too scattered doing that), story notes, moodboards, playlists, story research, and any other odds and ends I find helpful. Now, I used to have to keep a third of this stuff in a Word doc, a third of it in Spotify, and a third of this on Pinterest buuuuuuut! Since I’ve discovered Notion, I’ve discovered a place that allows me too keep literally everything in one place because of Notion’s ability to embed links like playlists and webpages!! So, of course, I got to work building a story bible Notion template and that, my dear friends, is what I’ll be sharing with y’all today! So without any further ado, let’s take a look!

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TEMPLATE TOUR

So, as you can see, there are six sections:

• Characters ↝ Contains (1) character sheet template. This is where I index my character sheets.
• Plot ↝ Contains (1) general story overview sheet and (1) plot sequence sheet template.
• World ↝ Contains (1) setting sheet template. This is where I index my settings.
• Little Things ↝ This is where I keep notes on my characters, settings, and plot that help make my story more vivid to me, but may not make it into my actual manuscript.
• Snippets ↝ Sometimes snippets of other scenes or pieces of dialogue come to me when I’m working on a different scene, but I want to write them down to remember. This is where I do that
• Moodboards ↝ This is where I index my moodboards for my story.

Now, there are three sections I want to go over because they have templates inside them…

CHARACTERS

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This is where I not only catalogue my characters’ traits, but also keep track of their desires, fears, and motivations. I also have a general overview of a character’s role in my story, as well as a brief, simple scene-by-scene overview of a character’s role and a more detailed scene-by-scene overview.

PLOT

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Here is where I keep a general overview/synopsis of my story. I also have “chapter breakdown sheet,” where I breakdown each chapter into scenes and each scene into beats.

WORLD

This is where I catalogue my settings using my setting template. Within the setting template, there’s a section for geographical/location description, culture (for if you’re building a larger world), and importance to the story.

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GET THE TEMPLATE HERE

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So that’s all for today, dear friends. I hope you found this useful if you’re writing something, be it during this Nanowrimo or any other time of the year! That’s all for today, folks, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to enjoys some chai and a good book!

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SPILL THE BEANS, FRIENDS!

• Are you participating in Nanowrimo 2020?
• Do you use Notion to help organize yourself?