Trees, or, how to keep track of a plethora of Characters

As you may have noticed, this is another blog post.

I know, I know. They are like London buses. You have nothing for ages and now suddenly two crop up. Well the truth of the matter is, as I mentioned, that I bought a Chromebook. I'm enjoying it and trying to be more organized in my ways of working. It's why I bought the Chromebook in the first place. It seems to be working. I am on an organizing drive. Images, documents, mp3s and anything else that I can lay my hands on. I have done a reasonable amount of internal organization too. I have turned ephemeral ideas into things that are a little more concrete. I have started compiling my notes into something useful. I believe that it is Terry Pratchett, someone whose work I greatly admire, who has a directory on his computer called 'The Pit'. I have ended up with something very similar. A great morass of junk, duplicated documents and irrelevant information. I have been trying to render it less morass-y and more reclaimed-farmland-y. It has been going well.

George RR Martin, another writer I hold in esteem, has huge long lists at the back of his books in order to keep track of all the different characters. I think that I am going to need something similar. I'm not really stealing his idea, I certainly wouldn't want to include them as appendices, more that he has had a good idea that I could perhaps share relative to organizing my characters.

I know he can be spiky about people reusing his ideas so I hope that he is OK with my reproducing a little of his organization. I don't have houses per se in my book so I think that I will need to organise them in a tree structure relative to their geographical location. Different characters have different interactions in different places at different times which means that my geographical structure may not work. But a tree structure is almost certainly the way forward. I think I may colour code them. Principle Characters, Major Actors, Medium Actors, Minor Actors, Foreshadows and Mentioned.

For example, I have a character called 'Tom'. He is a barman and has been repeatedly been mentioned through the chapters as some of the action takes place in his bar in the town of Outpost. Other then pleasantries, I don't think he has much to say. He would be a Minor Actor but his two daughters, also mentioned by name and who have virtually nothing to say in the book would be Mentioned.

Why is this necessary? You do like to ask questions don't you.

The answer is because I am on an organizing drive and getting that organized and keeping it up do date will help me write. I haven't been writing of late and so I have tried to drive that inactivity to place myself into a situation where when I go back to writing, everything is where I need it. Plus, I can never remember names when it comes to mentioning them again and I don't always have the Notebook to hand.

I hope it works. If it doesn't, it will be George RR Martin's fault.*

DR

 *Seriously George, it won't be your fault it will be mine.**

**What will be your fault is not getting the Winds of Winter out soon enough.