A while back I promised that my posts about self-publishing would eventually give way to posts about writing. In my case, as I’m writing a series of books set in a world of my own making, I’ll begin with how I manage the characters in my Auros world.
My world came after I had the inspiration for my two main characters. As the story and world grew, I needed a way to manage a growing cast of characters.
My Preliminary Tool: Excel
For the longest time, I used Excel to manage my characters. One nifty feature of Excel is data grouping (when you know how to use it) to create sections of rows (or columns) and collapse/expand as needed and create sub-groups and sub-sub-groups, and so on. This can work to show generations.
I eventually hit a few challenges:
Where to put one character who is a child of two other characters but also as a spouse without repeating the character under multiple groups (or families)?
Under which parent to put the children (that is, as a subgroup of which parent to represent a lower generation)?
How to show complex relationships through marriage?
It was really getting out of hand and hard to manage especially when it got to my main characters whose relatives also had parts in the series. Do I put them together, but then how do I show their parents, siblings and their spouse and children? What a mess!
When I decided to look for a better tool to manage my characters, I already had a huge cast, with up to 3 or 4 generations in some families.
The Search for a Better Tool
When I googled managing characters, except for Scrivener, I didn’t really find anything that seemed to be made for writers, at least something that matched what I was looking for.
What often came up in my searches were family tree software. Then I thought, what better tool to show relationships between characters than a tool made to manage families? But which software?
My Needs in a Family Tree Software
Here are some of the characteristics I was looking for in a family tree software:
Free version
Able to manage relationships
Able to manage date of births, date of deaths and other important dates
Flexibility in date format (my world does not follow a 12-month calendar)
Flexibility in types of data I can capture
My Character Management Tool of Choice
I ended up choosing MyHeritage Family Tree Builder.
Here are the features I like about this tool:
Free version (I haven’t checked what’s available with he paid version since the free version covers my needs).
The characters created don’t need to be related.
Lots of information can be managed about a person or locations (like place of birth) linked to that person.
Lots of different types of facts can be managed.
I can upload an image for each person or fill in fields to describe the character physically (or write the description out).
I can write general notes about each person.
The date fields don’t require a full date, I can just enter a year (which is usually what I care more about) or no date at all.
I can manage relationships between characters, more than just the simple parent-child or spouse relationships (for example: status of a relationship can be managed such as divorced, separated, engaged to name a few).
I can put dates to the relationship(s).
I can find out how 2 characters are related.
I can search my characters in various ways (makes it easy to check how many names I have that start with a certain letter or if I used a name already).
When looking at a character, the spouse, parents, and children are visible and linked to the character.
I can choose how many generations to view at a time.
I can build a genealogy chart (various formats).
I can create reports.
It can calculate age (at least based on year for me).
I can back up the information.
The above is not an exhaustive list of the available features.
Here are a couple of nifty things I did:
I manage the names of horses by giving them all the last name of “HORSE”. It makes it easy to look up the name of a horse.
I went back generations to come up with ancestors for the ruling family.
I use the description field to manage month and day since my calendar doesn’t follow any of the calendars the tool supports.
I can create my own fact type. For example, I created the fact type “In book” to manage what book(s) a character is in.
A Few Minor Annoyances:I do wish it had a “fictional” option so that I didn’t have to ensure there is no syncing with the online site. I’m not trying to find real people that may be related to my characters.
It would be great if it didn’t tell me that a character is probably dead because he or she is rather old (given today’s date and my world's date are nearly a thousand years apart).
Conclusion
I really do love MyHeritage Family Tree Builder to manage my huge list of characters. I can create multiple projects so if I ever need to manage a different cast of characters for a different series, I can do that.
It did take some effort to transfer my characters from Excel to Family Tree Builder but it was worth it. I started with the main characters and when it was in the tool, I would just grey it out in Excel.
So what kind of tool do you use to manage characters? What do you like (or dislike) about what you use?
Let me know.
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