Every writer I know keeps worldbuilding notes, and almost nobody can find anything in them. A character sheet in one file, half a page about the city in another, a list of place names in a chat with a friend, and the rule about how the magic actually works in the margin of chapter nine, in pencil. Learning how to organize worldbuilding notes is less about the tool than about three decisions any notebook, wiki or app will reward: what counts as a thing, what each thing is called, and where it lives.
This guide gives you a system that works on paper and in a folder of text files first, then shows the same system in a Lokee vault, where the structure does some of the work for you. The running example is The Ashen Circle, the demo story about a rebel network in the walled city of Duskhollow: Rowan Ashe, his sister Mira Voss, Lady Iseult Varnhold and her ledger, Magistrate Ophelia Crane, and a tavern called the Gilded Lantern. If you are starting from nothing, read how to start worldbuilding for a novel first; this guide assumes the notes exist and have become a pile.
Why worldbuilding notes rot, and what a system has to do
Notes rot for a boring reason: they are written in the order you had the thoughts, and you look for them in a different order. You wrote about Iseult's ledger on the day you invented it, next to a paragraph about the weather in Tarnside. Six months later you look under Iseult, under Varnhold Manor, under "ledger". It is under "Tuesday".
A system for worldbuilding notes has to do three things:
- Find. Any fact about one thing is reachable from that thing's name, including the other names you have used for it.
- Compare. Facts of the same kind are written the same way, so you can line up every character's age without reading prose.
- Change. When a fact changes in the story, you can record the new value without losing the old one, or hunting down the five places you mentioned it.
If a habit does not help you find, compare or change, it is decoration, and decoration is what makes systems collapse: the colour-coded index nobody updates after week two.
Entity, note or attribute? The one decision that sorts everything
Here is the sorting rule in notebook terms. Each piece of worldbuilding is one of three kinds:
- A thing that other things refer to: a person, a place, a faction, an object, an event. It gets its own page.
- A fact about a thing that you might compare or that might change: age, title, where someone lives, who leads a faction. It gets a labelled line on the thing's page.
- Thinking: research, options you have not chosen, scene ideas, a rant about why the magic cannot work the way you first wrote it. It gets a loose page, filed by topic, with a pointer to the things it is about.
In Lokee those three kinds are an entity, an attribute (a field on the entity's card) and a note. The decision tree is the same whether you are holding a pen or a mouse.
| You have written | Make it | Because |
|---|---|---|
| "Ophelia Crane, Magistrate of Duskhollow, keeps three red ledgers" | An entity, Ophelia Crane, with a field for her title | Other things refer to her; the title can change |
| "Ophelia's age: 52" | A field on Ophelia's card | You will compare ages, and they change |
| "The Watch could raid the Lantern in act two, or maybe act three" | A note linked to the Gilded Lantern and the Crown Watch | A thought, not a fact; you have not decided |
| "Tarnside is the dock district of Duskhollow" | An entity, Tarnside, with its Location set to Duskhollow | A place inside a place; maps and the two-places-at-once check use it |
| "Gilded Lantern: dim, smells of tallow, the back room has no window" | The Description on the Gilded Lantern's card | Texture you will read, not compare |
The mistake that costs most is promoting thinking to fact. A note saying "maybe Mira knew about the ledger all along" is harmless. A field on Mira's card saying "Knows about ledger: yes" because you were leaning that way on a Tuesday is a continuity error waiting for chapter twelve. Keep the undecided in notes. The worldbuilding while you write guide calls this the smallest rule that settles the scene: decide what the scene needs, write that down as fact, leave the rest as thinking.
The opposite mistake is keeping facts in prose. "Rowan grew up in Tarnside, moved to the Lantern after his father's arrest, and now sleeps in the Undercroft" is a fine sentence and a terrible record, because the place that matters, where he is now, sits at the end of a sentence that also names two places he is not. In a notebook, pull it out into a labelled line. In Lokee, give the Character type a Location field of the Place kind; it reads Choose a place… on the card and points at the Undercroft as an entity, so maps and the consistency check can use it. Setting up a story bible that scales covers field kinds.
Naming things so you can find them again
Rule one of finding: every thing has one canonical name, and every other name you have ever used for it is written on its page.
Sera Nightingale is "Kestrel" to most of the Circle, "the Nightingale girl" to Ophelia, and plain "Sera" in your notes from before she had a surname. In a notebook you keep an index at the front: Kestrel, see Sera Nightingale.
In Lokee the index is built in. Open Sera's card, find Aliases and use Add alias… for Kestrel and for "the Nightingale girl". Four things read aliases: the search palette (Ctrl+K or ⌘+K) finds Sera when you type Kestrel; @ in the Writer offers her for @Kes; passive mention suggestions underline "Kestrel" in your manuscript as a possible link to her; and AI extraction matches "Kestrel" in a document to her instead of proposing a second person. That last one is what makes aliases pay for themselves when you import old notes: every alias you add before an import is a duplicate you will not have to merge after it.
Canonical names deserve a minute too. If the manuscript says "the Magistrate" forty times and "Ophelia Crane" twice, the canonical name is still Ophelia Crane, because titles move between people. "The Magistrate" goes in aliases, and the day she loses the office you move it to her successor.
Folders: by story role or by kind?
Rule two of finding: every thing lives in exactly one place, chosen by something that will not change mid-draft.
There are two ways to arrange folders. By kind: characters, places, factions, objects. By story role: the Circle, the Watch, the Varnhold household, Duskhollow's districts. By kind is safe and dull. By story role is what you actually think in, and where you will look in the middle of a scene. In Lokee the kind is already handled by the entity type, so folders are free to follow the story. The demo's structure is a reasonable template:
characters/circle,characters/watch,characters/varnholdplaces/duskhollowfactions
To file an entity, use assign folder on its card and type the path, or select several entities in the list and use Assign to folder for all of them at once. The sidebar's Folders tree shows the hierarchy under All entities, with Unorganised holding whatever you have not filed. Folders are not objects you create and rename; a folder exists while something is in it and disappears when nothing is, which is why the tree never fills with empty folders from abandoned schemes.
The one rule for folder names: choose a grouping you will not rename. "Act one characters" is a bad folder because the character will be in act two next month. "Villains" is a bad folder because your mentor turns traitor in the rewrite. Households, regions, organisations and the books of a series are facts about the world, not about your current plan.
Notes have their own folders in the Notes section, with New folder and the same folder/subfolder paths, plus All notes and Unfiled at the top. Here by-topic beats by-role: research, plot/act-two, rules/magic. A note is thinking, and you look for thinking by subject.
Tags for what cuts across folders
A folder answers "where does this live". A tag answers "what is true of this that I want to filter by", and a thing can carry several.
On entities, Lokee insists on the type:value form; a tag without a colon is rejected with the example faction:house-lannister. The rule forces you to say what kind of label each tag is. For The Ashen Circle the useful ones are:
pov:rowan,pov:mirafor viewpoint characters,secret:ashen-circlefor anyone secretly working with the Circle,status:draftfor entries you wrote in a hurry and have not checked,source:book1for things already in print that can no longer change.
Filter by them with Tag (type:value) in the sidebar search; the Timeline's Filters take a tag too. The match is exact, so settle spellings early: pov:Rowan and pov:rowan are different tags.
Tags on notes are plain words, without the colon, because a note has no type to scope a tag against. Add them under Tags with Add a tag, and keep the vocabulary small.
One caution for every tool: tags have no history. If "secretly works with the Circle" will stop being true in chapter twenty, it is a relationship or a field with a recorded change, not a tag. Record changes instead of overwriting them is about that.
Linking notes to the things they are about
Rule three of finding: thinking points at things. A page of plot ideas about the raid on the Lantern is useless filed under "plot" unless, when you open the Gilded Lantern, you can see that the page exists.
In a notebook that is a line at the bottom of the Lantern's page: "see also: plot ideas, raid". In Lokee open the note, find Linked to and use + Link to…. A note can link to an Entity, a Board, a Chapter or a Map, any number of each. The link is two-way: the Gilded Lantern's card gains a Linked notes section listing the note, and so does the chapter or map. Switch on Show notes on graph under Settings → Graph features and notes linked to at least one entity appear on the relationship graph as nodes of their own, a surprisingly good way to see which parts of your world have had thought spent on them and which are bare.
Moving years of old notes in without losing a weekend
Migrating is where good intentions go to die, so the order matters. Do not start by creating entities. Start by getting the text in, then promote.
Step one: bulk-import the notes as notes. In Notes, Import notes takes a batch of .md, .txt and .docx files and makes one note per file. Lokee saves a restore point first (listed as "Before notes import" under Restore Points) and records the batch in Import history, so a wrong import is one roll-back away. An afternoon of scattered files becomes a searchable list, and nothing has been decided yet.
Step two: file and link, don't rewrite. Put the notes in topic folders and link each one that is clearly about one or two things to those things, if they exist as entities. Resist editing the notes; you are building the index, not the book.
Step three: promote things to entities. Now read the character and place notes and create entities for whatever passes the earlier test: referred to by other things, or carrying facts you will compare or change. By hand, one card at a time, copying facts into fields and texture into Description, is slow and the most reliable. When the notes are long, use AI extraction instead: the Import page in the sidebar takes a .txt, .docx, .md, .epub or .pdf file up to 50 MB and proposes entities and relationships from it, and nothing is created until you review and commit. In cloud vaults that runs on Lokee credits, which needs a paid plan; in a local vault on the desktop app you can use your own OpenAI or Claude key, or a local model. Turning an existing draft into a living story bible walks through the review screen and the AI Extracted banner each new card wears until you verify it. It also covers the route I took with my own novel, Medalion, which I turned into a vault with Claude Code rather than by hand.
For short notes there is a third door. The Text tab of Capture, opened from the microphone button on any vault page, takes a paragraph such as "Finn Voss is Mira's son, about nine, hides in the Undercroft" and offers Extract entities; it shows the cost first, proposes Finn, the Undercroft and the relationship, and you choose what to keep. When what you typed is a general thought rather than facts, the review offers Save as: a Vault note or a Board sticky note instead.
Step four: aliases and duplicates. Extraction plus years of inconsistent naming will produce two Seras. Add the aliases you know about first. Then, in a local vault, Find duplicates → on the entity list opens Merge duplicates, which proposes pairs for you to Keep A, Keep B or Skip. Cloud vaults do not have that page; there, move anything worth keeping to the card you keep, delete the other, and add its name as an alias.
Voice notes cover what you never wrote down. In Notes, 🎙 Record voice note records or uploads audio, shows the transcript, offers Clean up for punctuation and paragraphs, and Save as note. No entity extraction runs on a voice note, so on a local vault it works with your own transcription provider and no Lokee credits.
When you want your notes back out, Export all or Export selected in Notes produces a zip of Markdown files that preserves your folder structure. Your thinking is not locked in.
Keeping it organised without a weekly chore
The system that survives is the one maintained by the act of writing. Three habits do most of the work.
Add things in the right shape when they appear. When a new character walks into a scene in the Writer, select the name and use Link entity; if they do not exist yet, the same popover creates them, so they are an entity from their first sentence. When a value changes, use Record a change… beside the field rather than overwriting it. Ten seconds now, an hour to reconstruct later.
Extract when you finish a chapter, not when you finish the book. Extract this chapter in the Writer proposes the entities and relationships the chapter introduced. Reviewing ten candidates is a pleasant five minutes; reviewing four hundred is not.
Let the vault show you the backlog. Three places tell you where the mess is:
- The Unorganised folder in the entity sidebar and Unfiled under Notes: the filing queue.
- Statistics: counts of active entities, relationships and types, charts by type, and the list of isolated entities with no relationships at all. An isolated character is usually one whose connections live in prose instead of on the graph.
- Health, in local vaults only: Conflicts (two attributes with the same name and different values), No description, No attributes, No citations and Isolated (no relationships). Cloud vaults do not have the Health page; Statistics and the consistency check cover most of the same ground there.
Then, once per draft, open Consistency Check and use Run deterministic check (free). It covers the whole vault, costs nothing, and its findings are usually filing errors before they are plot errors. Running a continuity check before every draft explains each finding.
What "good enough" looks like at 50, 300 and 1,000 entries
Organisation has a size, and the right amount changes with it.
Around 50 entries: a short novel's worth. Three or four entity types. A name and a description on everything, aliases on anyone with a nickname, and the handful of fields the plot asks about. No folders yet; the list is short enough to scan. Notes in two or three topic folders. The graph should already show every main character connected to at least one other; an isolated protagonist means the relationships are in your head.
Around 300 entries: a long novel or a trilogy in progress. Folders earn their keep here: by household, region and organisation. Tags for viewpoint and for what is in print. Every place entity has its Location set to the place that contains it. Fields are consistent across a type, which means you pressed Backfill missing fields after adding fields late. Notes are linked to the entities they discuss. The Unorganised folder is empty at the end of each draft, not each day.
Around 1,000 entries: a series bible. The filing is the same as at 300; what changes is the discipline around change. Nothing is overwritten; every value that moves has a recorded change at a world point, because at this size you can no longer remember what was true in book one. A source: tag separates what readers have seen from what is still fluid. You run the consistency check per draft and read its Problems group as a to-do list. And you stop trying to describe everything: a thousand entries with a one-line description each beat three hundred essays. Local vaults have no entity limit, but past a thousand what keeps a bible usable is consistency of shape, a type-and-field question rather than a filing one.
Common mistakes, a five-minute reset, and where to go next
When it goes wrong
- Everything is an entity. Weather, moods, the colour of a door. The graph becomes a hairball. Fix: demote anything no other thing refers to into a description or a note.
- Everything is a note. Four hundred notes, no entities, no fields. Searchable, not comparable. Fix: promote the fifty things with the most mentions first.
- Two filing schemes at once. Half the characters under
characters/, half undercircle/. Fix: select all, Assign to folder, one scheme, one afternoon. - Folders that encode the plan.
act-one/,to-cut/,maybe/. Fix: move plan-shaped grouping into tags that can be removed, and keep folders for the world.
In five minutes
- Open Unorganised and file whatever is there with Assign to folder.
- Open Unfiled under Notes and link each note to one thing it is about.
- Add one alias you used this week to the card it belongs to.
- Look at the Isolated count on Statistics; connect one isolated entity or delete it.
- If a value changed in today's writing, record it with Record a change… rather than overwriting.
Where to go next
The filing habits here depend on a decent set of types and fields; setting up a story bible that scales is where to design them. If what you are organising is an existing draft rather than loose files, turning an existing draft into a living story bible is the faster route. For the buttons, the help sections on notes, entities and relationships and capture are short. And to see a filed vault before building one, the demo at /demo is The Ashen Circle, already sorted.