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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36941
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36941
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One thing to keep in mind is that your setting bible is an internal document. Your players (or readers or viewers or audience) will never see it. As a result, the moment you spend a single second working on improving your bible that doesn't result in saving at least a second's worth of work later on, you've started wasting your time. Your players will notice if your setting is inconsistent, but they'll never know whether your bible was well-organized, formatted prettily, or contained some cool details that didn't come up in the story.

Furthermore, a huge part of the writing process is being willing to revise repeatedly and heavily. Whatever you write in your setting bible must be changeable later on because you **will** realize that some details get in the way of your story and other details are missing and need to be added. I'm working on a ten-page screenplay, and the biggest change I had to make after my first draft was adding and changing many details about the setting in order to make the magic more believable and the stakes more palpable. The consequences of this unavoidable aspect of the writing process is that the more time you spend on your setting bible up-front, the more details you will ultimately have to throw out or rework, increasing the amount of time you spend on the story altogether. In addition, spending too much time on the story bible up-front can lead to you being afraid of throwing details out or heavily revising it later, which will either make writing take more emotional and mental energy or keep you from making helpful changes altogether.

As a result, my advice is to stop focusing exclusively on the setting bible sooner than later. In fact, I suggest seriously considering starting on your story now. Once you have the broad strokes of your setting figured out and a handful of specific details that you already know how you'll tie into specific characters, themes, and plot hooks, you can write the story and always add missing details to the setting bible later.

If you're working on this project by yourself, even if only for now, you can err on the side of starting writing the story sooner than later. The primary purpose of the setting bible is to help you keep your thoughts in order, but you can very easily edit it as you go. If you're collaborating with other people, erring on making sure your bible has most of what you need to start writing is reasonable. Any changes you make to it need to be clearly communicated and agreed upon by everyone, and changes that help out one person might require someone else to do some rework, so making changes is harder. Either way, though, you **will** have to make changes to your setting bible as you work on the story, so continuing to work on the bible without writing the actual story will prevent you from making progress towards your final product.

* * *

Even though I've said all of this, there's definitely a lot of wisdom to doing your research and homework ahead of time to make sure you know where your story is going. The polar opposite of spending too much time on a setting bible is spending no time planning your setting ahead whatsoever, and that is a much worse mistake to make. I'm very glad that you have the good sense to plan your story out carefully!

The reason I wrote this specific answer in response to your question is that it's clear your setting bible is already detailed. I'm not sure whether you've done enough that you're best off getting to writing the story itself now or if you should spend a little bit more time on your bible, but it's clear to me that you are very close.

This doesn't tell you which of the five categories you should spend the most time on. This is because I think you might be close enough that the answer is to work on _none_ of them and instead get to writing the story! You'll continue to modify all five categories as you go. But I believe you're close to the point where it's better to let your story tell you which categories need modifying and how.

Original score: 6