Hierarchical Story Bible

I've been thinking of this for a while, and it would go well with your evolving Series, Project, and Chapter relationship.

To be proactive and a little controlling, I maintain my Story Bible content externally from SW. I maintain it on Series, Book/project, Chapter, and Scene levels. I copy content to and from SW as needed. This way, there is no loss of what influenced prose at any stage, and I can readily control, refer, and troubleshoot.

This is tedious and time consuming, but it allows me to review Story Bible content at any level, at any time, right down to a Scene. In SW, these changes are not persistent outside of a disconnected Trash, because live Story Bible content is necessarily overwritten every time.

It would be nice to have a hierarchical Story Bible that lives at each level and can be replicated between these levels: Series, Project/Book, Chapter. Then, I could maintain what I want at each point without swapping in and out, non-destructively, and all within SW.

Functionally, I'd then like to be able to do the following:

• Replicate/Copy from Series to Project to Chapter, and in reverse.

• Replicate between Projects within the same Series

• Replicate between Chapters within a Book/Project.

In other words, replicating Story Bibles between parents and siblings, and between siblings.

Matching child SB elements should take precedence over matching parental elements. If a child has the same element name as a parent, then the parent element is ignored when AI-generating content of any sort (like temporarily turning it off). Writers would quickly learn how to maintain their Bibles. Plugin writers could write plugins to work with this hierarchy and its relationships.

In the entertainment industry, there is a formal structure: there's a Series (Show) Bible and a Story (Episode) Bible. At the scene level, there are simply Scene Directions. A Series Bible describes all those things that stay the same throughout the series. Same basic idea for the Episode (here, a book/Project). In Sudowrite, we could extend this one level to the Chapter, where it would similarly act in its own self-interest. For Scenes, we do as we currently do, and include [Instructions] as headers or inline -- although, I'm a proponent of formalizing Instructions (I.e. Direction) within Sudowrite. Each level could look up to a parent’s Bible. (Reading this back, it sounds an awful lot like OO encapsulation and inheritance!)

The more all this becomes predictable when using Sudowrite, and the less we have to leave Sudowrite, the better the experience, and the more we're in the zone and writing.