Series Canon

What it is

Every book carries its own facts. Book 1 says Maren has gray eyes and was born in the flood year. Book 3 says her brother is two years older. Book 4 says the northern pass closes in winter. Each fact is true inside its own book. The series canon is what you get when all of them have to be true at once.

Canon is StoryHelm’s structured record of your characters, places, factions, items and events. Each book adds what it establishes, and series canon holds those records together across every book in the series, so the Maren in Book 1 and the Maren in Book 4 can be compared as one character, matched by her name. A fact can belong to a single book, or to the series itself when you move it there.

Where it comes from

• Your manuscripts. The analysis reads each book and pulls out the characters, places and events the text establishes. These go into that book’s Canon right away, and the checks use them as they are. You can confirm or correct any of them, and a later read never overwrites a detail you confirmed.
• Your notes. Story Elements scans raw notes for names, quotes the line each one came from, and hands you a candidate to review before anything is added. What you approve stays in your Story Bible for reference, and the continuity checks do not read it.
• Your own entries. Facts you add or edit by hand count as settled. The analysis does not overwrite them.

What gets checked across books

Once the books sit in one series, StoryHelm can compare what each book records about the same character and the dates two fully read books give the same event. StoryHelm’s cross-book check looks for three kinds of drift, and leaves three to you:

• Appearance and marks. A recorded physical detail that changes between books: an eye color, a scar, a birthmark, a physical description.
• Voice. A shift in how a character speaks, where both books hold enough of that character’s dialogue.
• Dates. The same event given a different year, month, season or length in two fully read books.
• Not checked: identity. A name, title or role is never compared, so a character renamed between books is not flagged.
• Not checked: relationships. Each book records who is related to whom, and you can review those links book by book, but a sister who becomes a cousin is not flagged.
• Not checked: existence. Places, items, factions and the world rules StoryHelm extracts are not compared, and neither is a character present in one book and gone in another.

Before a difference is reported, StoryHelm asks whether the two entries describe the same character, or, for a date, the same event. It matches characters by name, or a near spelling such as Tomas and Thomas, so two different characters who share a name are usually treated as one person.

StoryHelm builds the series canon from what your books say and what you confirm. A read can still get a detail wrong, so you can correct any entry, and StoryHelm never writes your prose. When StoryHelm finds two books that disagree, each finding appears as an observation on the Continuity page, with what each book records set side by side. You decide which version is true and make the fix, and StoryHelm records your call on the finding: resolved, intentional or dismissed. The cross-book check runs only when you start one from the Checks page of your series: you choose at least two books with a completed read and see the credit cost before you confirm. Adding or removing a book can leave a reminder on your series overview suggesting a check, and finishing a read does not start one. It works on every plan.

An example

A four-book fantasy series. One character, two books, one detail that moved.