Jun
23rd
2018
How do you guys keep track of a large cast? · 9:06pm Jun 23rd, 2018
(Warning: Spoilers for Ch. 127 of Ranger, in case you're reading.)
Last night I was talking shop RobCakeRan and of course I had to bring up Ranger. I showed him the current Mega Spreadsheet and he commented on how he didn't usually do stuff like that to keep track of things. Granted, most stories probably don't really keep track of all the characters, but I am curious about how other writers do.
Do you just trust your memory? Or do you write them down? Do you have a system to keep track of them? If so, how?
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Wanderer D · 428 views
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Smaller cast, I do a google doc of it listing details relevant or mentioned. Larger, a spreadsheet. I'm looking at a way to link and/or search connections. That way it'll (behind the scenes) look like one of those 'how to find a serial killer' boards with strings and pins connecting X to Y to D to P in case I need to search for interactions, etc.
I write details down.
For one thing, most stories have a supporting cast half as long as your main cast. That helps. Granted, though, I'm starting on a project with a fairly big cast myself. I really should get something done, organizationally speaking.
Now, one thing I have done in the past is make D&D style character sheets. Great for individual characters or smaller casts, but more than 5 and it starts to be a hassle
I rely mostly on memory for Songs of the Spheres, with only the scant outlines I draw up reminding me who exists where and what plot threads they're going through. It may help that (at this point) I alternate between different 'sets' of protagonists - there's the primary team, a secondary team, and a tertiary team, all of whom have different individuals differently related to the world around them, and suited for specific kinds of adventures and the like. They all know each other and have the same overall goal in many ways, but are each compartmentalized.
That said, I do have at least one instance of me completely forgetting a character existed - and it was supposed to be a pretty major plot point too. This ended up turning out for the better when I DID bring them back, but had that happened with a different individual at a different moment it could have derailed everything.
I also think it helps to continually talk about your characters, what they do, and where they might be going with friends. If they care about what you're writing, they may remind you of things that happened that you've forgotten about.
Last piece of advice I can think of: create a character hierarchy. Most of the time "protagonist" "secondary characters" and "Background characters" will work, but for larger stories with loads and loads of characters they need to be compartmentalized. "Primary protagonist" "secondary protagonsits" "mebmers of protagonist A's group" "joke characters" "antagonists that aren't the main antagonist" "main antagonist" "tertiary characters" etc etc. I don't make these classifications into a solid list because I like to be surprised when a "background character" ends up a "member of protagonist A's group." But I still keep them arranged by 'purpose' in my mind.
This has been GM rambling about loads and loads of characters. (If I'm being honest with myself a list of all characters in a chart would probably help, I just haven't tried it.)
-GM, master of SCP.
The epic I'm working on has most of the canon characters in addition to upwards of 30 OCs, so I've taken to organizing them in my outline gdoc. As well as their names, I've started importing descriptions of them from the prose.
*shrugs*
I never have more than nine or ten characters with significant amounts of dialogue.
I tend to have a more narrow scope in my stories.
4888357
same.
Don't have one? :V
I just use my noggin to keep track of it all.
Also, my pre-readers sometimes fix my continuity mistakes. And if they don't catch them, my readers do.
Mostly memory, dividing certain characters into subgroups so I know who'll be interacting with who should a scene with them come up (the downside is it's kind of rigid and doesn't allow for a whole lot of character development for non-viewpoint characters).
A combination of memory, notes, and backreading, mostly.
Had one story that went up to about 70 characters and that one I spent a lot of time flipping back through previous chapters. Remembering the character and what they did was rarely a problem, remembering things like what they look like was a pain.
Excel spreadsheets. Though I usually use it to keep track of opinions so I know how character should interact with each other
I remember seeing a chart on Lord of the Rings (a major furball of characters and locations) where each character had a different color line going left to right across time so the characters could be grouped... (click, click, click) Ah, here we go. XKCD is great.
JK Rowling had a set of notebooks she kept the characters in. She showed it in a few 'making of' clips. Seemed very short and abbreviated until you try to come up with character descriptions by reading the stories. Maybe it doesn't take much.
I write mine down and keep them in a mini-binder.
It's easier on me that way, what woth my lousy memory.
I would certainly use a spreadsheet, because I love spreadsheets.
For a story that never got finished/published, I made a form of sorts with fields for the names, various stats, descriptions, and backgrounds. For the main story I'm editing right now, we just go by memory for the most part, although the author does keep some notes.
Side arcs.
I don’t? I do my best but sometimes I forget them and have to reread my stuff. Sometimes I use the wrong name. And sometimes, I put Pivot Pelt in a changeling pod and forget about him for 30 chapters.
Notes and double-checking earlier stories. It's an imperfect system, but it hasn't caused any truly catastrophic paradoxes. Yet.
4888396
I do the same thing, BUT I have a scene involving those subgrouped characters with the main stable of characters I am focused on doing extensive development with. I do a lot of rereading as well to help me get those final, niggly little typos I missed the other times around.
Unless one is doing an "historical" piece, I've never found it a good idea to focus on too big a cast because most of my readers can only fully follow a few at a time, i.e. the "heroes journey" if you will.
Granted, I'm not a writer, but while reading Project Horizons I felt I had trouble tracking all of the cast and made a big honking spreadsheet with appearances and deaths, as well as things like job, affiliations/allegiances, appearance, and personal relationships. I had considered converting it to a MUMPS database at some point as a way of doing something fun while practicing for work, but never got around to it.
If they don't have an arc, they don't count. Characters who don't have arcs are static and it doesn't matter how they come and go: you sum them up by having them be themselves.
Ones that do have an arc, you can't really do more than three arcs at a time unless they're combined arcs. You team up characters and get them through combined arcs, to points where they're 'stable' and you can leave them for a while as if they were characters without arcs. When the arc is resolved you can look away from the character(s) safely because they'll be predictably the same when next you see them.
I've had Applejack and Dash, Luna and Lyra, and Rarity and Derpy in that state: complicated elaborate arcs that concluded in stability, and then the pairs dropped out of sight for a while. The important thing about ginormous casts of characters is that nobody can keep track of all of them unless most of them are in stasis. it's a much smaller subset of characters which can be growing and pursuing story arcs/characterization arcs, and it doesn't have to be all the same subset but you do have to park the characters correctly when you park them.