by Janis Patterson
Be at ease – this is not a religious rant. I am using
‘bible’ in the purely secular definition, i.e., ‘a book that is considered the
most important one for a particular subject.’ (Just to put things straight, Bible
with a capital ‘B’ is the religious book; bible with a small ‘b’ is the
definitely un-religious context I’m using here.)
I’m talking about the book about your book.
Confused? You shouldn’t be, either about bibles or books
that obviously haven’t had one. We’ve all read a book where a minor character
changes names somewhere in the book – Mavis the bookkeeper becomes Maura
somewhere around chapter 22, for example. Or a location shifts without reason
or warning – the crime scene is located north of the river for most of the
book, then suddenly migrates to south of the river for a chapter or two, then
miraculously appears back on the north side. The detective who favors a Beretta
suddenly and without justification starts carrying a Glock. Such mistakes are
not only confusing and irritating to the reader, they are the sign of a lazy
writer.
When I become queen of the universe, one of my proclamations
is going to be that everyone writing a book has to do a bible. Many writers –
especially the good ones – already do. There are all kinds of formats for bibles,
from expensive software to cheap spiral bound notebooks, but however they work
all serve to keep your characters, locations, timeline and odd facts straight.
I do a bible for every book I write, and mine are about as
simple as you can get. (Warning – I’m a pantser, so if you’re a plotter or some
other kind of writer, you’ll have to adapt this to your particular process.)
When I open a new file to start a new book, I open two – one for the
manuscript, one for the bible. As I write and something (character, location,
whatever) appears, I flip over to the bible and make a note of it. Just a short
note with all the pertinent information – the bigger part that particular
whatever plays in the story, the bigger note it gets. Later on, if I reveal
something more about that whatever, I add it to their entry in the bible.
Entries are usually single spaced with double spaces in between one and the
next to set them off.
I don’t bother to alphabetize or rate entries according to
importance – I just note them down as they appear. Believe it or not, this
doesn’t create a problem when I have to go look something up several chapters
later. As I said, the entries are short and very factual, and for most books
the entire bible doesn’t run more than 3-4 pages – a lot easier to flip through
than going back through the whole manuscript to find the name of Lady
Bellingstoke’s butler or whatever.
The one exception to this generality was my semi-paranormal
gothic INHERITANCE OF SHADOWS – the bible for that ran almost eighteen (yes,
18!) pages of dense copy. In my defense, however, I will say that book was more
complex than any other I’ve ever done, with a romantic storyline, a
father/daughter storyline, a sort-of-ghost story and seven different books
written about seven different worlds, all of which had a direct bearing on the
main action of the novel! All in one book… When I sent in the final conceptual
manuscript to my editor I also sent in a copy of the bible, for which I got an
almost sobbingly-happy letter of thanks from the copy editor.
Writing a book is hard enough without tripping yourself up
on the minutiae. Keep a bible, write down every fact and name as it happens,
and your life will become so much easier – and so will your editor’s!
