I mentioned Airtable a few weeks ago among my Friday Fives: Favorite Writing Tools.
I’m going to give you a little overview of how I’ve used Airtable to turn my unorganized collection of notes and spreadsheets and images into an effective and organized Writing Bible.
One of the greatest benefits I’ve found with Airtable is the ability to organize a variety of media types and cross reference between tables within the database.
I’m not covering every tab in my database, because spoilers, but I’ve included screen captures and a general overview if you’re interested in finding a new way to organize your thoughts and character info.
Book Info
My first spreadsheet is dedicated to book information and metadata. With a quick look I can find my book’s AISN, ISBN, character names, pricing, covers, and more. You could also add store universal links, blurbs, and anything else you might need for marketing. Each of the spreadsheets come with numerous options to create different views, so you can organize your books by series, publication status, or quickly hide fields you don’t need to see and save each of the views for quick access.
Character Info
Next up we have detailed information for each of the characters where I can enter quick notes, about their appearance, mannerisms, importance, relationships, and affiliations with clubs, businesses or locations. For all of my main characters, I have also included reference or inspiration images, which I can focus on by switching over to gallery view.
Locations & Associations
I have two spreadsheets to track locations that my characters may visit and associations like clubs, organizations, or other groups they’re affiliated with.
Supplemental Info
I also have a couple of spreadsheets with reference images for different eye and hair colors, so when I’m building my character profiles, I can select choices with a visual reference.
Airtable presents an almost endless list of possibilities to organize your ideas and characters to keep everything straight while you’re writing and building a series.
If you’d like to give Airtable a try to create your own Writing Bible but don’t want to start from scratch, you can click the link below to access a blank copy of my database to customize and fill in however you’d like.