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 thing every other check compares against.

A series Canon holds five 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 in Book One and should not be raising its own banner in Book Three).
• 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).
• 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: is this the same Helen who ran the inn in Book One, or a new one. Did this character's stated age move. Has this faction been called two different things across the series. When the Coherence Guardian raises a contradiction, it is comparing a new scene against the Canon and pointing at the exact field 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. Because Canon is shared across books through the Story Bible and widened across the series through the Series Atlas, you can open any entity and see everywhere it appears, every chapter that touches it, and every fact the text has committed to about it. A bible you maintain by hand falls behind the manuscript; a Canon rebuilt from the prose stays current as you write.