Giving AI context: your story bible
The most common mistake when asking an AI for help while writing isn't a badly phrased prompt. It's asking it to reason about a novel it doesn't know.
Context matters more than the prompt
An AI answers well when the right facts are in front of it: who is in the scene, what happened in earlier chapters, what register the book has. Without those facts, a request like "make this dialogue tenser" produces generic tension — plausible for any novel, right for none.
You can spend half an hour polishing the instructions, but if the AI doesn't know the two characters have hated each other for twenty years, the result stays beside the target. Give it the facts, and even a plain prompt works.
The story bible: the stable facts
In NovLore the dashboard holds the cards for your work — characters, places, objects, timeline, reminders. It's the story bible: the place where anything that has to stay consistent in the book is written down once.
When you ask Spark about a character and pick them from the card selector, the full card travels with the message. You don't paste it: the system attaches it. That's why the selector doesn't copy the fields into the text — it would send them twice and waste credits.
A budget, not the whole book
NovLore doesn't ship the entire novel with every request: that would be slow and expensive. It sends a targeted excerpt — the card you named, the last few messages of the conversation, the chapter you have open. Each scope has its own context budget.
The practical consequence is direct: a well-tended story bible produces better answers for the same credits. If the protagonist's card says "wary, speaks by leaving things out", every dialogue the AI helps you revise starts from there.
What to keep current
You don't need to fill everything in. You need to keep in order what the book can't afford to get wrong:
- the cards for the main characters, with voice and goals;
- the timeline, if the story's chronology is tangled;
- the reminders, for decisions made and easy to forget mid-draft.
The rest you can add when it comes up.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to paste the character card into the message to Spark?
No. If you choose the character from the card selector, NovLore attaches the full card to the request. Pasting it by hand means sending it twice and paying more credits for the same context.
Does more context always mean a better answer?
Up to a point. Beyond it, the AI scatters across details irrelevant to the question you asked. An essential, precise story bible beats a long, messy one: relevance counts, not volume.