Craft of Writing: Keep a Book Bible or Not?

 Dear Reader,

I've been experimenting with trying to get all of my notes in order and creating a 'book bible'. This is the ultimate notebook of source material for your novel or series. I'd like to report that I've had some success with this but, honestly, I have so much material scattered over so many places that the act of collating it into one spot is hazardous. It is an exhaustive, labor intensive process to transcribe material that is in other places into one book. I simply don't have the spoons for it at this juncture to do so. It's a great concept but I am left digging through notebooks for snippets that I remember putting down and discovering more that I had forgotten about.

The closest thing I have to a book bible is a notebook that I filled with ideas back in 1998 when I had the first version of the first book come back to me from a shady company's contest shredded and discovered that the file for the book had gotten deleted because a certain someone decided that my book was definitely going to win a publishing contract and we didn't need the manuscript anymore. (Book one of the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar has been rewritten three times before it reached its current form. Each rewrite was a result of nonsense like that.) I still reference that little notebook. But I simply have too much material scattered around to put it into a notebook and organize it.

I was disappointed when I realized I simply couldn't do this. Because the premise of having all of your material in one place to reference is fantastic. I am going to attempt to do this with other projects, but the Umbrel Chronicles of Evandar simply can't have a book bible. I'm too disabled to take the work out of approximately fifteen notebooks and jam it into one and then organize it. I am highly frustrated with this fact. At the same time, I have those notebooks in approximately the same space so I can find what I need after a few minutes of searching.

As it stands, anyways, those original plans and how the books are evolving are very different. Things took a hard left in book six and I'm not entirely sure how to fit the story back into the container that I had formed for it. But, I think the books are stronger and more interesting for deviating from the plan. This is also something that I can't go backwards and cram into a single notebook. The closest thing I could do is keep a plot log as I was writing. I tried that once. It was an awful experience.

So, if you're going to keep a book bible, start it at the baby stages of your project. Trying to go backwards and cram it all in later is madness.