Story bible and lore software that writes itself

Every novelist has started one. A spreadsheet of characters, a document of place names, a page of rules for how magic or money or the law works in the book. Then the draft takes over. The bible says one thing, chapter nineteen says another, and neither gets corrected because keeping the two in step is a second job nobody signed up for.

The problem is not discipline. It is that a bible kept in a separate document has no way of knowing what the manuscript says. Bunsho keeps the bible inside the editor and lets the manuscript do the filing.

Open a character and you get what a careful reader would have noted: traits and physical details, where she has been, what she owns, who she is tied to, and what she knows. Open a place and you get who has been there and what happened. Open an object and you see what the manuscript has said about it and where. Each line that came from the manuscript points back at its sentence; each line you wrote yourself is marked as yours.

That matters at revision time. Change a character's age in the World tab and then run a full review, and every chapter that disagrees with the new age is flagged with both passages in view. The bible stops being a document you consult and becomes a standard your book is held to.

Lore is the part of a story bible that fantasy and science fiction writers cannot do without and most tools treat as a notes field: how the magic is paid for, which house holds which city, what the ship can and cannot do, who may enter the archive. In Bunsho those rules are entries like any other. Write that a spell costs a memory in chapter two and the World tab records it, tied to that sentence. Add a rule by hand before you have used it and it counts as canon.

Then the rule works for you. Run a check on chapter fourteen and, if a character casts without paying, the finding shows the rule and the scene that broke it, side by side. The same holds for invented places and factions: a city that moves rivers between chapters, a guild whose name drifts, a border that sits on the wrong side of the mountains. Writers who prefer to draft the bible first can start from the free story bible template and story timeline template, then let the manuscript take over the filing.

Scrivener gives you a binder for character sheets, but the sheets know nothing about the draft beside them. A spreadsheet is faster to search and just as blind. Sudowrite and NovelCrafter keep a bible the AI reads while it drafts, which helps it write but does not tell you when your own chapters disagree. Bunsho's World tab is built for the other direction: it is the memory the continuity checker reads, and the same memory Director Mode answers to when it drafts a scene.

For a closer look at how characters, places, objects, and relationships are tracked, see the World tab feature page.