Your story’s memory
The Story Bible
Every character, place, thread and date, maintained without you maintaining it.
What it is
The Story Bible is a living reference of everything your book contains: characters, plot arcs, world elements, a timeline of events, and the relationships between them. You do not write it. After each session, CharmWriter reads what you said, extracts the people, places, events and decisions in it, and files them — creating new entries and adding to existing ones. It is then fed back into every AI request, which is the mechanism by which a book stays consistent across hundreds of pages and months of work.
Where to find it: Workspace → left panel. On phones: the Story tab in the bottom navigation.
What this covers
- Character sheets with roles, descriptions and arcs
- Plot arcs with type and status
- World elements: locations, cultures, rules, organisations
- Timeline of events
- Relationships between entities
- Automatic updates after each session
- Pending update cards you approve or dismiss
- Full-text search across the bible
- Click-to-edit any field
- Per-field AI assist
- Revision history per entity
- Duplicate detection and merging
- Merge undo
- Written in your book language
How to use it
- 1
Talk first — the bible follows
You do not create entries by hand. Have a session, press Analyze, and the characters and places you mentioned appear in the left panel.
- 2
Review pending updates
When the AI wants to change something it already knows, it proposes rather than overwrites. Pending update cards sit at the top of the panel with Accept and Dismiss.
- 3
Open an entity to read or edit it
Click any card to expand it. Click a field to edit it in place. Your edits are authoritative — the AI adds around them rather than replacing them.
- 4
Use AI assist on a thin entry
Inside an entity's detail panel, the sparkle button beside a section asks the AI to expand that one field using everything else it knows about your book.
- 5
Search when the book gets big
The search box filters every entity by name. Once a book has forty characters this is faster than scrolling.
- 6
Clean up duplicates
Open the Story Map and use Manage → Merge to scan for duplicate characters, places and arcs. Every merge is reversible from the "Recently merged" list.
What it gives you
Consistency without bookkeeping
The reason chapter nineteen still has her brother's name right is that the bible was updated in chapter two and has been in the AI's context ever since.
It is yours to correct
Every field is editable, and your edits stick. The bible is a document you own, not a black box the AI keeps to itself.
Nothing is overwritten behind your back
Changes to existing entries arrive as suggestions you approve. Every accepted change is logged in that entity's revision history.
It reads back as a real reference
Character sheets carry an arc that accumulates across sessions, so you can see how a person changed through the book rather than only who they are now.
What the four categories hold
Characters carry a role, a description, and an arc that grows an entry per session as the person changes. Plot arcs carry a type and a status so you can see which threads are open. World covers locations, cultures, rules and organisations — anything that is part of the setting rather than a person. Timeline holds dated events with the characters involved, and is what feeds the timeline views in the Story Map.
All of it is written in your book language, so a Ukrainian manuscript has a Ukrainian Story Bible.
How it reaches the AI
CharmWriter does not send your whole bible with every message — that would be slow and expensive. It assembles context in priority layers: the book overview and style guide always; then whole-book pacing awareness; then the specific characters and places mentioned in what you just said, plus the entities related to them; then the current chapter and session notes.
The practical consequence is that mentioning a character by name, or @mentioning them, is what guarantees their full sheet is in view for that message.
Good to know
- The bible is built from session transcripts. Prose pasted directly into a chapter, without a conversation, is not extracted.
- Extraction reads what you said, not what Charm said. The AI's own commentary is deliberately excluded so it cannot invent themes you never raised.
- Long books accumulate near-duplicates — "Maria" and "Maria Kovač" filed separately. The merge scan in Manage exists for exactly this, and is worth running occasionally.
- The bible is a reference, not a plot generator. It records what your story contains; it does not decide what should happen.
Questions
Do I have to fill in the Story Bible myself?
No. That is the point of it. Talk about your story, press Analyze, and it fills itself. You edit only when it gets something wrong or you want to add detail it could not know.
What if the AI files something incorrectly?
Click the field and correct it. Your edit is treated as canon from then on, and the change is recorded in that entity's revision history.
Why do I have two entries for the same character?
Usually because the name appeared in two forms. Open the Story Map, go to Manage → Merge and run a scan; it finds duplicates across characters, places and plot arcs, and every merge can be undone.
Can I export my Story Bible?
Yes. The Markdown export has an option to include the bible, and the account data export contains it in full.
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