Braindump
Braindump is the StoryHelm feature that reads your raw, unstructured notes and extracts structured Canon entities (people, places, factions, items, events) for you to review and confirm.
Part of: Canon workflow · Powered by: Claude · Output: Proposed entities you approve into your Canon
What it does
Most series authors carry their world in three or four places at once: a notes app, the margins of a printed draft, a half-finished spreadsheet, and the back of their own memory. It holds together in your head, which is exactly the problem. StoryHelm cannot check a fact it has never been told, and your head is the one place it cannot read.
Braindump is how that world gets out of your head and into something StoryHelm can read. You paste in whatever you already have, a tangle of character sketches, place names, faction notes, the rules of your magic, a rough timeline, and StoryHelm reads it the way an editor reads a series bible: looking for the people, places, factions, items, and events buried in the prose. It proposes each one as a structured Canon entity, with the detail it found and the line it found it on. You then confirm what is true, edit what is close, and discard what was just a passing thought.
It pulls five kinds of entity out of your notes:
- People: named characters, their roles, relationships, and the traits you stated (a scar, an age, an allegiance, an eye color).
- Places: cities, taverns, keeps, rivers, regions, and how they sit relative to one another.
- Factions: houses, guilds, orders, armies, and the loyalties and rivalries between them.
- Items: the sword that matters, the inherited ring, the stolen ledger, the artifact your plot turns on.
- Events: the battle, the coronation, the betrayal, the date a character was born, anchored in time where you stated it.
You stay in charge of what becomes canon
Braindump never quietly adds anything. Every entity it extracts arrives as a proposal, not a fact. Nothing enters your Canon until you confirm it. If StoryHelm misreads "the Grey Watch" as a place when you meant a faction, you fix the type and move on. The whole point is speed without surrender of control: your scattered world becomes one structured source of truth in minutes, and you never type a single entity into a form by hand.
Braindump extracts; it does not invent. It will not write you a backstory, name your tavern, or fill an empty field with a plausible guess. It reads only what you wrote and proposes structure for it. Once your world is in Canon, the Coherence Guardian can check every later chapter against it. To see how the full read works, start with how StoryHelm reads your series.
An example
Picture the kind of loose worldbuilding note a fantasy author might paste in, and the structured entities Braindump would propose from it.
Once these are confirmed, they become the entries the Coherence Guardian checks every later chapter against. See how a character entry grows from there: Build a character bible from your notes →
From here the world keeps its shape. If Book Three has Maren growing up in a landlocked town, the confirmed Harrowgate entry is the fixed point that flags the slip. The Canon and Story Bible pillar walks through how the whole structured world fits together.
Related terms
Braindump is where a structured canon starts. These terms describe what it feeds and what comes next.
Canon
The structured single source of truth that Braindump fills: characters, places, factions, items, and events.
ReadCoherence Guardian
The continuity check that runs against the Canon your Braindump built, flagging contradictions before readers do.
ReadPlot DNA
Per-scene intensity, stakes, beats, and thread coverage: the structural layer that sits beside your Canon.
ReadThread Coverage
How StoryHelm tracks which plot threads each scene advances, so the events you dump in stay accounted for.
Read