Soothe Your Creative Chaos: How I Organize my Novel Series

Writing a book is hard work — writing a book series even more so! How do authors keep track of all the characters and places and things? How do they avoid plot holes and inconsistencies? In the past, I tried notebooks, grids, slap dash Word documents, even spreadsheets and note cards. Each of those options has its place, but now that I’m fleshing out my world and planning five new books instead of one, I needed to find an easy, efficient way to keep track of everything.

You may have heard the term “series bible” before. This is essentially an author’s Encyclopedia of their series, the place where they organize and link together the threads of their story into something cohesive. Having everything in one centralized place makes the writing process faster, because you don’t have to go digging through files and notebooks to find that name you came up with weeks ago, or how old character A is, and so forth.

I got drawn in by the idea of using a wiki as my series bible, the same type of software that Wikipedia and Fandom.com use. But that requires learning the ins and outs of a new platform, and I honestly don’t have time to learn all the complicated technical details. Having dyscalculia makes navigating new software quickly difficult, so keeping things simple was my best option.

What I finally settled on was Microsoft OneNote. It’s remarkably easy to use and allows me to create separate tabs for all my locations and characters, and even add links within the content, to connect the different entries together. If I’m reading about a place and I’ve forgotten what one of the characters mentioned in that entry has done, I can click on their name and it’ll take me to their entry. It’s delightfully simple, and I love simplicity.