It’s an understatement to say that novels are wild creatures with amorphous shadows and more appendages than we can often see when we look at stories head-on. A novel may have so many moving parts that a writer will find it impossible to catalog and mark not only the critical storytelling elements like resolutions, subtext, and characters, but also the actual story’s props like a murder weapon, setting, and stolen money or artifact.
Even books that aren’t overly complicated have more elements working simultaneously to create the story’s world and atmosphere inside the reader’s mind. These moving parts go beyond what can usually be covered in outlines, plot devices, or beat sheets. It takes a tighter lens or focus to really get all the parts of a novel in one place so you can fix the wonderful metadata of your story that makes it work.
Metadata, by definition, is information about other data. Essentially, metadata is the
