Every book is surrounded by an invisible web of information that never appears on the page: a character's eye color, the layout of a city, the rule that magic always comes at a cost, the timeline that has to stay consistent across forty chapters. Notes are where all of that lives. They're your scratch pad for everything that supports your writing but doesn't belong in the book itself.
Keeping this material inside Author's Forge—rather than scattered across sticky notes, separate documents, and your memory—means it's always a click away while you write, and it stays with the project for the life of the series.
What to Use Notes For
- Character sheets: Keep track of physical descriptions, backstories, and relationships
- World-building: Maps, histories, magic systems, cultural details
- Research: Facts, quotes, and references you might need
- Plot outlines: Scene lists, story beats, chapter plans
- Revision notes: Things to fix in the next draft
There's no wrong way to use notes. Some authors keep one detailed note per character; others keep a single "story bible" note for the whole world. Start simple and let your system grow with the project.
How Notes Work
Notes live at the bookshelf level, meaning they're shared across all books on that bookshelf. This is intentional—your research and character notes often span multiple books in a series. The protagonist you introduced in book one is the same person in book three, and her character sheet should follow her there without being copied and pasted.
This shelf-level sharing is also why your library structure matters: if you want a set of notes to be available to a group of books, make sure those books and notes all live on the same bookshelf.
Creating Notes
Right-click on:
- A Bookshelf and select "Create New Note"
- The Notes folder and select "Create New Note"
Notes use the same editor as your chapters, so all the formatting you already know—headings, lists, bold, block quotes—is available to structure your reference material clearly.
Organizing with Tags
Each note can have tags for easy categorization. Use them however makes sense for your workflow—by project, by type, by status. A few patterns writers find useful: tag by kind ("character," "location," "research"), by point in the story ("act-one," "climax"), or by status ("needs-research," "locked"). As your collection of notes grows, good tags are what keep it browsable.
Notes and AI Chat
Here's where notes become genuinely powerful. When you use the AI Chat feature, you can include notes in the search context. This means the AI can reference your character sheets and world-building when answering questions about your story.
Ask "What color are Sarah's eyes?" and the assistant can pull the answer straight from your character note. Ask whether a scene contradicts your established magic rules, and it can check the scene against the note where you wrote those rules down. The more you capture in notes, the more your AI assistant understands about the world you're building—and the more useful its help becomes.