Canon

What it is

Most authors already keep a story bible somewhere. A document of character names, a map of the kingdom, a spreadsheet tab with everyone's age and hair color, a folder of notes that swelled over four books. It holds up until the manuscript and the notes drift apart. The line that says the harbor is on the east side gets written before the scene that puts the sun setting over the water, and nobody re-reads the whole bible before every chapter, so the two never meet. By book four, no one is holding all of it in their head, and the small slips start to accumulate.

Canon is StoryHelm's version of that bible, with one difference that matters: StoryHelm builds it by reading the manuscript itself, not by asking you to fill in a form. When you bring in your books, the analysis reads the prose and pulls out the entities it finds, the people, the places, the factions, the objects that carry weight, the events that anchor the timeline, and records them as structured data. That structured record is the Canon. It is the record the continuity checks compare against.

A series Canon holds these kinds of entity:

• Characters: names, aliases, roles, relationships, and the traits the text establishes (an eye color, a scar, a vow, a wound that should still be healing three chapters later).
• Places: cities, rooms, regions, and their geography (which side of the river the inn sits on, how far the capital is from the border, what the throne room looks like).
• Factions: houses, guilds, armies, councils, and who they are sworn to (a house that bent the knee, the lord who leads it, and the families that follow it).
• Items: the objects the plot leans on (a sword that was lost, a letter that was burned, a ring that changes hands and shouldn't reappear).
• World rules: how magic, technology or law works in your world (a spell that needs spoken words, a pass that closes every winter). In a Full read, the Coherence Guardian can flag a scene that breaks a rule the same book sets up.
• Events: the dated and ordered happenings that build your timeline (a coronation, a death, a battle fought on a specific day of a specific season).

Why it has to be structured, not just written down

A prose bible is something you read. Canon is something software can reason over. Because each entity is a record with fields and not a paragraph buried in a doc, StoryHelm can ask precise questions of it: does the Helen of Book Three have the same recorded eyes and scars as the Helen of Book One. Does this chapter contradict a fact the same book already set down. Is this name, in a scene you just saved in the editor, spelled almost like one already on record. When the Coherence Guardian raises a contradiction in a Full read, it is comparing the book's chapters against that book's own Canon and naming the recorded fact that no longer agrees.

In practice

The moment Canon matters most is when a fact set early in the series is contradicted late, two books after you could hold both pages in your head at once. You would rather catch that yourself than have a reader catch it for you.

The same record does more than catch contradictions. Each book's Canon lives in that book's Story Bible, and the Series Atlas lists every book's entries together. Open a character in the Story Bible to see its recorded details, the chapters of that book that name it, and a few sentences that mention it. A bible you maintain by hand falls behind the manuscript; a Canon updated from your prose each time the book is analyzed reflects the book itself rather than a separate doc that drifts.