Story Elements

What it does

Most series authors carry their world in three or four places at once: a notes app, the margins of a printed draft, a half-finished spreadsheet, and the back of their own memory. It holds together in your head, which is exactly the problem. StoryHelm reads your manuscript, not your head, and a fact that lives only in your head is easy to lose by Book Three.

Story Elements is how that world starts to get out of your head and into your Story Bible. You paste in whatever you already have, a tangle of character sketches, place names, faction notes, the rules of your magic, a rough timeline, and StoryHelm picks out the capitalized names in it. It proposes each one with the exact sentence it came from. You then file what is real as a record and set aside what was just a passing thought.

You can file each name it finds as one of five kinds of record:

• People: named characters. The record keeps the name only, so the traits you stated (a scar, an age, an allegiance, an eye color) stay in your notes.
• Places: cities, taverns, keeps, rivers, and regions, by the names your notes give them.
• Factions: houses, guilds, orders, and armies. The loyalties and rivalries between them stay in your notes.
• Items: the sword that matters, the inherited ring, the stolen ledger, the artifact your plot turns on, when your notes give it a capitalized name.
• World rules: the named laws of your magic or your world. Events are not a kind, so the battle, the coronation, and the betrayal stay in your notes.

You stay in charge of what goes in your Story Bible

Story Elements never quietly adds anything. Every name it finds arrives as a proposal, not a fact. Nothing enters your Story Bible until you confirm it, and nothing here changes the Canon that a read of your manuscript records. Each proposal starts out labeled as a character, so if the Grey Watch is a faction, you file it as one before you approve it, or set it aside. The whole point is speed without surrender of control: the names scattered through your notes become records one approval at a time, and you never type one into a form by hand.

An example

Picture the kind of loose worldbuilding note a fantasy author might paste in, and the names Story Elements would propose from it.

From here the world has one place to look things up. If Book Three has Maren growing up in a landlocked town, StoryHelm will not flag it from these notes: continuity checks read your manuscript, and the cross-book check compares recorded details such as a character's appearance and distinguishing marks (and, when each book holds enough of her dialogue, how she speaks), as well as the dates two fully read books give the same event, not where she grew up. That slip is one to check yourself. The Canon and Story Bible pillar walks through how the whole structured world fits together.