From Panic to Process: How 'Are You Getting All This Down?' Built Our Story Bible

How a Universe Emerged from a Single, Anxious Question.

The most important document in this entire project is the Story Bible. It is our "single source of truth"—a living database containing every character detail, plot point, and thematic rule for our narrative universe. But it didn't start as a grand plan. It emerged from the conversation. Here is the process we used:

Step 1: The Accidental Discovery. In the beginning, our process was chaotic. I was simply free-writing, dumping years of half-formed ideas and character histories into the chat, trusting the AI's massive context window to keep track of it all. But I began to worry. Not fully understanding the technical limitations of tokens or memory, I had a moment of panic and asked, half as a joke and half in genuine fear, "Are you getting all this down?"

My AI partner's response changed everything. It replied, "It sounds like we are generating a great deal of foundational material. Would you like me to create a 'Story Bible' to structure and store this information?" That was the moment. The system we needed emerged organically from the conversation itself.

Step 2: The Guided Brain Dump. The first thing we did was to fill the new Story Bible with the content we had already created in our initial, chaotic free-writing session. I prompted the AI to read our entire conversation up to that point and organize it into the first "zero draft" of the document. Then, once we had that initial structure, the AI's role shifted from a passive listener to an active interviewer. Following a simple prompt, it would analyze the new Story Bible, find the structural holes and logical gaps, and then ask me probing questions to fill them in systematically.

Step 3: Choosing the "Chassis". Once the core concepts were in the Story Bible, we needed a skeleton to hang them on. We chose a classic narrative structure, "Save the Cat," as our "narrative chassis." This provided a proven beat sheet that we could use to organize the plot and ensure the story had a solid dramatic foundation.

This iterative process—from chaos to a question to a system to a structure—is the heart of our collaboration.

I cannot conclusively say who the author of this project is, but I consider everything you are about to read to be authored by me—a human—in close collaboration with a Large Language Model (LLM), more commonly known as AI.