Your world
Character design and arcs
Sheets for who you meant someone to be, and a check on whether the story agreed.
The story bible records who someone turned out to be. A character design records who you meant them to be — and lets you push the story gently towards it.
It is off by default, and deliberately so. Most novels do not need it, and it is the one feature here that can make a story worse if you use it to force rather than to steer.
The six sections
- Essentials — role, age, appearance, and how they speak.
- Motivation — what they want, what they actually need, what they fear, and the lie they believe about themselves. This is the part that does the work: the gap between want and need is most of what a character arc is.
- Personality — traits, virtues, and the flaws that can cost them something.
- History and secrets — their past, and what the reader does not know yet. A secret can be marked revealed once the story has spent it.
- Arcs — where they are going, in stages a chapter can act on.
- Relationships — who they are bound to, and where you want it to go.
The writer is told to express all of this through action and subtext and never to state it. A character who announces their own wound is not a character.
Draft, active, retired
A draft is yours alone and no chapter sees it. An active design can be read by the chapter writer. A retired one is kept for reference and stays out of generation.
Steering an arc
Mark one arc as current and press Steer this arc. From then on that arc's current stage rides in every chapter prompt as a nudge — not an instruction to reach the end of the arc, just a push in its direction.
Checking for drift
Ask for a drift check and you get back one of three verdicts — on track, drifting or diverged — with the findings that produced it. Each finding sets what you planned beside what the story did, with the chapters where it happened.
Then there are two ways out, and they are equally valid: steer it back, or accept the drift and update the sheet to match. Which brings us to the rule the whole feature sits on — the story always outranks the design. Characters deviate from what you planned, and that is usually the story working rather than failing.