The fiction writer's glossary: from story bible to retcon

This glossary defines the terms every fiction writer ends up handling: the craft terms (point of view, outline, character arc), the editorial ones (copyediting, galley proofs) and the continuity ones (canon, retcon, continuity error). Each entry is a self-contained definition you can consult on its own; entries are grouped by theme and alphabetized within each group.

English lemmas lead here, with the Spanish equivalent noted where the term travels between both languages — because it does travel: workshops, forums and writing tools mix the two vocabularies without warning.

The story bible and the world

Canon

Canon is the set of facts established as true within a work or fictional universe: what “really happened” in the story, as opposed to the apocryphal, the discarded or the speculative. In long series and sagas the canon grows with every installment, and keeping it coherent is precisely what a story bible is for.

Character sheet (hoja de personaje)

A character sheet is the structured record of one character: physical traits, backstory, voice, desires, wounds and relationships. It is the basic unit of the story bible. A good sheet separates what is stable (eye color, scars) from what evolves (loyalties, knowledge, forms of address), because contradicting one or the other produces different kinds of continuity error.

Relationship graph (grafo de relaciones)

A relationship graph represents characters as nodes and their bonds — love, kinship, rivalry, debt — as edges. Unlike a list, it shows the shape of the whole cast: triangles, alliances, chains of secrets. If it also records when each bond changes, it can verify scenes rather than merely archive them: Journzy, for instance, checks every chapter against a graph whose relationships evolve chapter by chapter.

Story bible (biblia de la historia)

A story bible is the reference document where an author records everything canonical about their work: characters and their attributes, places, relationships, chronology and the rules of the world. Its job is to answer continuity questions faster and more reliably than memory. It can be a notebook, a wiki or — in tools like Journzy — a knowledge graph the AI consults while you write. We have a guide on how to create a story bible.

Worldbuilding (construcción de mundo)

Worldbuilding is the design of the universe the fiction takes place in: geography, history, social systems, magic or technology, customs, languages. Not everything you build has to appear on the page; what matters is that whatever does appear holds together. A solid world generates rules, and every rule is a continuity obligation the story takes on with the reader.

Continuity and time

Continuity (continuidad)

Continuity is a narrative's internal coherence: established facts, attributes and states stay stable unless the story justifies the change. It covers the physical (traits, objects, distances), the temporal (ages, dates, seasons) and the relational (who knows what, how two characters address each other). Character consistency is its most visible front.

Continuity error (error de continuidad)

A continuity error is an unintended contradiction of something already established: green eyes that were brown in chapter two, a scar that switches arms, a character who knows what they cannot yet know. It doesn't break the plot — that would be a plot hole — but it erodes the reader's trust. Tools like Journzy detect them by checking the manuscript against the story bible; even famous novels commit them.

Internal chronology (cronología interna)

Internal chronology is the actual order of events inside the world of the fiction, regardless of the order in which they are told. A novel can be narrated out of sequence — flashbacks, parallel plotlines — but its internal chronology has to add up: ages, pregnancies, journeys, harvests. Many continuity errors are, at bottom, arithmetic mistakes along this invisible line.

Knowledge state (estado de conocimiento)

A knowledge state is what each character knows — and since when — at every point in the story. It is the slipperiest dimension of continuity: a character reacting to a secret nobody has told them yet is nearly invisible in the draft and glaring in the reading. It is worth recording chapter by chapter, like any other attribute of the canon.

Plot hole (agujero de guion)

A plot hole is a gap or logical impossibility in the plot: something happens that the story's own rules don't allow, or something that had to happen never does. It differs from a continuity error in scale: the plot hole breaks the causal logic of the narrative and usually demands restructuring; the continuity error contradicts an established detail and can be fixed in place.

Retcon

A retcon (from “retroactive continuity”) is a deliberate change to the canon: a later work or installment reinterprets or rewrites facts already established. The term was popularized in American comics, where decades of accumulated continuity force such adjustments. Unlike a continuity error, a retcon is intentional: done well, it recontextualizes the story; done badly, it betrays the reader.

Timeline (línea temporal)

A timeline is the ordered representation of a story's events, with absolute or relative dates (“three days after the fire”). Novels with several plotlines, generations or time jumps often need several coordinated timelines. It is the tool that turns internal chronology, which is abstract, into something you can consult and verify while you write.

Narration and voice

Character arc (arco de personaje)

A character arc is a character's inner transformation across the story: what they believe, want or fear at the start, and what they have become by the end. It can be positive (growth), negative (a fall) or flat (the character doesn't change; the world around them does). A believable arc moves through visible stages, and each stage is a state continuity must respect.

Chekhov's gun (el arma de Chéjov)

Chekhov's gun is the narrative principle that every element given prominence must end up mattering: if a rifle hangs on the wall in the first act, at some point it has to go off. It is attributed to Anton Chekhov's advice to fellow writers. It is the inverse face of foreshadowing: don't underline what you don't intend to pay off.

Foreshadowing (anticipación)

Foreshadowing is the planting of hints of what is to come: a detail, a line or an image that only reveals its full meaning later. Dosed well, it makes the twist feel inevitable in hindsight without being predictable. It demands memory from the author: a clue planted and never cashed in becomes a broken promise to the reader.

Point of view (POV / punto de vista)

Point of view is the perspective the story is told from: first person, third limited (glued to a single character), third omniscient, second person. It determines what information each scene may give: a limited POV can only tell what its character knows and perceives, which makes it a direct commitment to that character's knowledge state.

Register (registro)

Register is the degree of formality in a character's or narrator's language. In Spanish it has a grammatical dimension of its own: the choice of tú, vos or usted as a form of address. The shift from usted to tú between two characters is a relationship event — intimacy, defiance, rupture — and deserves tracking like any other fact of the canon.

Unreliable narrator (narrador no fiable)

An unreliable narrator is one whose version of events cannot be fully trusted: they lie, deceive themselves, forget or withhold. It is a legitimate, powerful technique, not a slip: the contradiction is deliberate and the reader eventually senses it. That is why any continuity review — human or AI-assisted — needs an exit for the intentional: authority over the text always belongs to the author.

Voseo

Voseo is the use of the Spanish pronoun “vos” as the singular second-person form of address, with its own verb forms (“vos tenés”, “vos sabés”). It is the educated norm in the Río de la Plata region and widespread across much of Central America, with variants in Chile, Colombia and elsewhere. In fiction, accidentally mixing voseo and tuteo in one character's mouth is a continuity error of voice.

From draft to print

Beta reader (lector cero)

A beta reader is among the first people to read the full manuscript and give reader's impressions rather than an editor's corrections: where they got bored, what they didn't understand, which character they didn't believe. Spanish usage speaks of the lector cero; some authors distinguish the zero reader (first draft) from the beta (revised draft). Their “this contradicts chapter four” notes are gold.

Copyediting vs. proofreading (corrección de estilo / ortotipográfica)

Two distinct phases of editing, sharply separated in Spanish publishing. The corrección de estilo (roughly, copyediting or line editing) works on the manuscript: syntax, clarity, repetition, coherence and flow, always respecting the author's voice. The corrección ortotipográfica (proofreading) comes later, usually on the typeset text: spelling, punctuation, typography and house conventions. A good copyeditor will catch the odd plot slip in passing, but neither phase reviews continuity systematically — that remains the author's job.

Galley proofs (galeradas)

Galley proofs are the printer's proofs: the text fully typeset and laid out as it will be published, which author and proofreader review before the print run. The Spanish name, galeradas, comes from the galley — the tray where lines of lead type were once composed. Today they are usually a PDF, but their function survives: the last chance to correct before the book exists.

Manuscript (manuscrito)

The manuscript is the complete text of the work as it leaves the author's hands, before editing. Almost nobody writes one by hand anymore, but the name persists throughout publishing: you “submit the manuscript” to agents and editors. It is the object that copyedits, beta readers and continuity tools all work on; before submitting, it pays to run a continuity checklist.

Outline (escaleta)

An outline is the story's advance blueprint: the ordered list of scenes or chapters with the essentials of each. Spanish borrows escaleta from screenwriting, and the term is now common among novelists. Writing from an outline (plotting) or by discovery (pantsing) are equally legitimate methods; an outline doesn't guarantee continuity, but it gives you a map on which to verify it.

Frequently asked questions