Your Character Bible

Meredith Bond
4 min readJun 9, 2024

If you are a serious author, please don’t do what I did — your future self will thank you.

Keep a book bible! For every book you write you need a list of all of the characters mentioned.

You may not think that it’s so important. You know who your characters are. Why is keeping a list of them so important?

As someone who is working on their 40th book, I can tell you that you need a bible — one for each book, one for each series, and one for all of your books altogether. Honestly!

If you do this either as you are writing (which, I’ve tried and it does get both tedious and distracting when you’re trying to stay in the moment of the story) or after the book is done, it will be much easier. You can try breaking it up so that after you’ve written a chapter you make a list of who is in it, or after so many chapters.

Keep a bible especially important if you have either a large main cast of characters or if your characters meet (even incidentally) a lot of people.

I write Regency romance. That means I write lots of balls and parties. My heroes go to their club where they run into acquaintances. My heroines go for tea where there may be between 5, 10, or even more people present. Not all of them may be mentioned, but for everyone who is, I need a record of their name and who they are. And…

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Meredith Bond

Award winning author, Meredith Bond's books straddle that beautiful line between historical romance and fantasy. Merry is also a writing coach and formatter.