Tips & Tricks
Tips, Tricks, and Troubleshooting
Three Steps to Awesome Prose
1️⃣ Make it your own
Modify the outputs you get from Story Bible to make them your own and express your unique voice. You’ll probably spot two or three things in each section which you don’t like. Take that opportunity to express your own ideas and you’ll be surprised how much Story Bible will begin to channel your sensibilities!
2️⃣ Keep it up to date
As you progress through Story Bible, details about your story will likely change. For example, your characters may evolve, the setting might shift, or you might change the ending. Keeping all of the sections up to date will make sure Story Bible doesn’t get confused as things change.
3️⃣ You decide what’s important
One of the creative choices you make in writing with Story Bible is deciding what information you emphasize to your junior writing partner. You might value Characters most and focus on characterization and arc. Or you might prioritize setting, or dialogue. Experiment with different emphases in your Beats, Style, and elsewhere and see what works best for you.
The Three Horsemen of Bad Prose
❌ Vagueness
Replace any vagueness with specific ideas. Otherwise, Story Bible will fill in the gaps, and that's an opportunity for it to either delight or disappoint you. It won't always delight you!
Story Bible suggests "The two decide to go for a walk" as a Beat.
This is OK, but Story Bible doesn't have enough info here to write 200-300 words, so it will look to the other sections for inspiration, and might even repeat something it has said previously.
To fix this, replace this Beat with something specific, like this:
“The two go for a walk to the cafe around the corner. They hash out ideas for how to deal with the dragon that appeared in their back yard. Andre suggests they train it to do deliveries, while Amber thinks they should kill it."
In short, generate stronger prose through specificity.
❌ Conflicting information
If Story Bible finds conflicting information in two or more sections, it will get confused and write something that doesn’t make sense. To avoid this, make sure all your sections are consistent and delete anything out of date.
Story Bible looks at prior sections to generate the current section. For example, Prose looks at Style, Characters, and Beats, so if you define a character as ”dreams to become a baker one day” but you have a Beat that says ”decides to quit being a baker”, Story Bible will be confused.
Which is it? Does this character want to be a baker or not!?
To fix the inconsistency, update the character descriptions to reflect your character at the point of time in the story you’re currently writing.
In short, generate stronger prose through consistency.
❌ Confusing wording
Sometimes we write something down that’s obvious to us but might be confusing to AI. When this happens, Story Bible might write something that is actually reasonable if you read carefully, but appears totally ridiculous on first blush. Try to be precise in your wording and look for ambiguities in each section to avoid this
You have this Beat:
"Joey tries to tell Suzie that there’s nothing wrong, but Suzie knows what he did".
To you this may be obvious. After all, in Chapter 2, Joey accidentally ran over the neighbor’s dog and buried it in the woods, but when writing Prose, Story Bible only looks at Style, Characters, and Beats, so it doesn’t know what happened in Chapter 2 unless you put it in Beats. In this case, Story Bible doesn’t know what ”what he did” refers to.
To fix this, you could be more precise and write:
”Suzie knows that he killed and buried the neighbor’s dog secretly” as part of the beat.
In short, generate stronger prose through clarity.
There’s almost always a rational explanation for any mistake Story Bible makes. As Sherlock Holmes says in The Hound of the Baskervilles, “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.”
Channel your inner Sherlock, and you’ll get back on track in no time.