How do I give an AI tool my story bible?
- One page beats twenty: the model reads a limited amount per request.
- Lead with premise, cast, rules and where you are in the story.
- Name the things it keeps getting wrong — that is what the brief is for.
- Re-supply it whenever you start a new conversation.
- Keep the canonical version outside the chat, so it never gets lost.
Write a one-page brief and paste it at the start of each session: premise in two sentences, the five or six characters who matter with a line each, the rules your world cannot break, and where in the story you are working. Detailed lore is counterproductive — it consumes the same budget the model needs for your actual scene.
Chapter i·Why it matters
Most bad AI output is a context problem wearing a quality costume. A model that does not know your protagonist is fifteen will write her as thirty and sound generic doing it. A tight brief fixes more output problems than better prompting does.
Chapter ii·What to include
- Premise in two sentences, the way you would pitch it aloud.
- Five or six characters, one line each: want, role, voice.
- Hard rules — the magic, the technology, the period, the things that cannot happen.
- Where you are: act, chapter, what just happened, what comes next.
- A short list of mistakes it keeps making, stated as instructions.
Chapter iii·Example
A mystery writer keeps a nine-line brief pinned in a note. Every new session starts with it. The tool stops resurrecting a character who died in chapter four, and stops setting scenes in a town the book left two hundred pages ago.
In WriteLoom
Keep the plan alive while you draft
WriteLoom builds the brief from your project automatically — premise, characters, beats and timeline are already attached when you ask for help.
Not ready for a workspace yet? Get the free six-part series on winning the writing game: finishing drafts, editing in the right order, querying with real math, and launching on a runway.