After a much needed break from working on my novel, I’m back at it and feeling more motivated than ever. This time around, however, I’m approaching it differently by using a Story Guide.

And let me tell you, it has made all the difference.

What the Heck is A Story Guide?

One of the biggest problems I have when writing a story is my inability to remember pretty much anything—the names of my characters, significant details of a setting, where I saved the word doc with the best first sentence. As you can imagine, continuity is a huge problem for me.

Not being able to remember these details can make it hard to make progress on your novel, or at the very least, make editing a pain. So, I created a story guide.

A story guide is essentially a document that keeps track of various elements of a story you’re writing. While you might think the document would get long and confusing, making use of features like headings, navigation planes, and search bars makes it super easy to find the exact eye color of a random duded named Chuck pretty easy.

How I Set Up My Story Guide

I start off by creating headlines for the essentials, such as characters and settings. As I continue to write and plan, I add more to the doc. Maybe I’ll add a section for world building and/or magic systems if I’m writing fantasy. Maybe I’ll add a section on lure if I’m writing a novel with my own take on vampires or ghosts.

You can build this document into what you need it to be. Here are some examples on what I put under different headings in a Story Guide.

Characters: This is where I keep the details on each of the characters in my book–names, physical descriptions, personality traits, relationship statuses, etc.

Setting(s): There can be dozens of different settings in a novel, each with their unique details. Under this section, I write out a description of the setting, important plot points that happen there, and (depending what I’m writing) even elements of that setting’s culture and politics.

Plot Outline: Fiction writers are often divided into two groups—planners and non-planners. I for one like to have a messy outline of my novel. Does that mean I’ll stick to it? Heck no. Still it’s nice to have incase I want to remind myself what comes next in my story. So, I included a section on plot outlining in my story guide. The outline is based off of the three act structure, which you can read more about here: The Three-Act Structure: The King of Story Structures

Resource Links: If you are not on the FBI watch list, did you really do research for your novel? Seriously, though, we writers have to look up a lot of details when it comes to professions we’ve never worked in, poisonous plants characters can use to off other characters, and so on. That said, I added a space for links to those online articles, videos, and webpages on my Story Guide to make them easier to find.

Document Links: I can’t be the only one who has multiple word docs for one story. Whether they are for your fist draft or random collections of paragraphs you wrote in an insane state of flow, it’s important to keep track of your documents. I recommend putting them in your story guide. Sure, you can file them in a specific folder, but linking them in a word doc gives you the opportunity to write brief notes on the document so you know what your are looking at and what your plans for those documents are.

I encourage you to make your own story guide and explore how it can help you make progress on your novel.