When you’re writing almost anything, you need some way to make the
different parts of the thing consistent with each other. You don’t
want to keep searching back and forth in your prose; you need
“auxiliary information” somewhere, a “bible” that retains
ultimate truth, which you can refer to when you’re trying to
remember something. We computer geeks refer to this as “external
memory” and the process of maintaining it as “information
management.” This post talks about the information I need to manage
for my secondary-world
fantasy (with occasional digressions), how I currently do it, and
what I wish I could do instead.
I’ve heard that
tools like Scrivener
have a lot of author aids, but I haven’t learned those yet. I use
simple document editors, in my case OpenOffice
(mostly text files, but also the occasional spreadsheet or drawing).
Someday perhaps I can make a followup post singing Scrivener’s
praises, but that day is a way off; I’m not in the right head-space
to learn a new technology just now. But even if you’re a Scrivener
wizard, perhaps reading about the kind
of information I’m keeping is worth looking at.
First
of all, for some things I
can just use a text search.
If I want to find all the places where minor character Fred does
something, I can just search for that name, possibly with “match
case” and “full word” options turned on. But as I add
details about a character’s background – anything that I might
have to mention again or have some chance of accidentally
contradicting – I add it to the bible in a paragraph headed with
the character’s name. For example, if I name a character’s 3rd
child, I add the name to a bullet list somewhere in the parent’s
description. I don’t write this out in advance, unless there is
something important I need to plan out. Thus I don’t name their
other children, or even decide their sexes, until I need to put them
in the story. The most minor of characters don’t get names and
notes, since there’s no need (usually) to figure out if guard #1 is
the same person as guard #3; any “inconsistencies” can be
attributed to it being a different person.
For geography, like
the names of the countries in my secondary world, and where they are
in relation to each other, I started with text descriptions, but
there is no substitute for a map where you can see
the 2-dimensional relationships among them. I recently bought Other
World Mapper and am happy with it. With a couple of hours’ work
I put together something that helped me fix several inconsistencies
in the story. Some of this I could have done with a sketch map, much
faster than with any mapping program I’ve heard of, but the extra
effort was worth it when I realized some aspects of the story
required me to change where various countries were in relation to
rivers, mountains, and each other. I’d have had to redraw a hand
map, but moving small stuff around on a computer screen was much
faster. I once rearranged
part of the story so certain events happened after other events that
they’d originally preceded, which meant they were in a different
region that had a different language. So I swapped two countries
around – a simple move of two labels – which was much easier than
redrawing a hand-made map.
For
research notes of the most general sort, I don’t have a substitute
for a good old prose document. When reading a research source, I take
the same sort of (mostly)
point-form notes anyone might do. Sometimes indenting bullet lists
within bullet lists
is helpful – major topics at the outer level, related minor ones
indented under their corresponding major one. But I’m starting to
get to the point where I need to cross-link some information with
other information, like on a wiki. I’m investigating WikidPad,
but haven’t committed to it yet (there’s
that thing about having to learn a new techology, though I have
edited other kinds of wiki before).
I’ve just barely reached the point where my notes are getting
complex enough to justify the time to learn it.
I’ve
taken writing
classes
where we had to fill out a small spreadsheet with rows for each major
character, and columns for major characteristics like name, role in
story, gender, race
or ethnicity,
orientation,
age, (dis)ability, and religion. This can help you decide if your
cast is sufficiently diverse, in addition to just keeping track of
key information. Big white
spaces show you where you haven’t figured something out yet, and a
column of white (or
a different background colour)
can show you an entire category where you haven’t thought things
through. Next time I’ll probably set up the background for cells
via conditional formatting, so they
are automatically yellow when blank.
My
most complex spreadsheet was for a science fiction story which had a
technobabble gravitic drive capable of accelerating continuously in
normal space halfway to a “jump point” in the outer solar system,
then flip over and decelerate. I needed to keep track of how far away
the ship was from Earth, because of lightspeed delays in
communication, and an approximation to relativistic effects so I
could tell if there was any significant time dilation. I had to keep
track of where things were in the ship’s day, and how long after
event X some other event Y would take place – so that if I moved X,
I automatically moved Y. There are programs like Aeon
Timeline that will help with simple cases of events happening
relative to each other, but my needs were complex enough to mandate a
spreadsheet anyway. I had to change the ship’s maximum acceleration
a couple of times, and watch for events getting too close to fixed
points in the ship’s day like start and end of shifts. I had to
make sure the ship reached its jump point in the middle of ship’s
night, so passengers would be asleep during the very disturbing
passage through the jump.
One makes a lot of decisions while creating a world. An
important part of a “decision support system” is keeping track of
why you made a certain
decision; if you change the decision, the rationale needs to change.
The reason this is important is that some decisions impact other
ones, with potentially major consequences. There exist tools for this
sort of thing, but they’re complex to use, and I don’t know of
any that are free. I’ve not done such a great job of that so far,
so have yet to think through how I’m going to do it – other than
making sure to write down rationales in an easy-to-fine place.
Probably right by the note recording the decision, with a big
rationale
flag on it that I can easily search for.
There
are plenty of things I haven’t
figured out, relevant to structural issues. Scrivener or other tools
might support some or all of these; I just don’t know.
- If I have an outline (which I do for the bronze age novel, but not for any of the others) I’d like to be able to get from the outline to the chapter or scene that corresponds to it. This is not the same as using a table of contents, because there could be multiple outline elements handled in a single chapter; three scenes in one chapter could be three outline entries. I can do that by including the outline at the end of the novel and using cross-references, but that’s awkward and possibly a little ugly and messes up the word count. Going the other way is awkward. If I’m on page 19 and want to find out where that is in the outline, I have to scroll to the end of the document, and notice that item 2 starts on page 15 and item 3 on page 21, so that I’m actually in item 2.
- I’d love to be able to automatically keep track of how many words there are in each chapter. When I did this by hand I found that some were twice the average length, which led me to discover wordiness and pacing issues.
Maybe
someday someone will have created the Ultimate Authoring Tool that
links all these things together, but a piece of software like that
might be so huge and
complex (and thus buggy) that it’s scarcely usable.
For
now, I’ll make do with the tech I have, but learn some of the tools
I’ve linked above as I have time for new things.
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