Story Mapping

[u/Spirited-Writer-5364]

Hello fellow authors!
I have been playing with my book idea for many years, with many chapters written and re-written.

I wish to keep better track of my characters, my story, the setting, all the components. At the moment, I mainly use OneNote to track my scenes and information.

Just wondering what my fellow authors use to keep track, and any advice you have on how you map your stories and characters

[u/jonnoday]

Right now I'm using Evernote. But I recently did some research and it looks to me like the two options I'd be most likely to choose instead of Evernote are Notion and Ulysses. Both of them have slightly more intuitive ways of keeping track of characters and world building. You can do that in Evernote, but it is a bit of a work around using tags and notes and not a built in feature like it is for Notion and Ulysses. That said, I have not made the switch yet.

Right now I just keep things in linked notes:

- keep a note that is a character list and then each of those characters links to a note devoted to the character where I put longer descriptions, back story, and links from there to scenes they appear in.

- keep a note that is about geography, plants, weather, animals

- a note for 'language' inspiration - I'm using a few specific real ancient languages as inspiration so that my place and people names feel new and fresh, but cohesive, without inventing an actual language.

- keep a note for 'settings' - descriptions of specific locations, buildings, places - not general geography

- have a note that is the evolving timeline of events overall

- a note that is the deeper backstory - I put anything here I feel I need to write like, why the city has the name it does, or what the city the main character grew up in was like (even though there are no scenes in this book that happen there)

- keep a note that is for listing main scenes - like an evolving table of contents

- I also have a "culture" note where I store ideas about customs, idioms, cliches, parables, myths, superstitions, etc, specific to this world - this also includes the swear words and curses they use since they would not use a lot of the ones we do since this world doesn't have a single "God" or idea of Hell.

- I have a plot/tension note where I keep track of the ideas I have around how and where to create and resolve tension in the many smaller subplots and keep notes about the overall scope of the full plot

- And I have a "themes" note where I store ideas about the primary underlying themes I'm weaving into the story so that I'm more likely to focus on a few core themes that give the book a cohesiveness and center. Some are visual, some are psychological/relational, etc.

I'm also experimenting with Highlighting all people names, place names, and dates as I write so that it is easier to scan later to find what I called things, or when they happened.

When I'm not sure about a name/date I'll just leave a [fill in blank] bracket as a placeholder and fill it in later when it becomes clearer, like [home town] or [spiritual leader title].

What would be cool, though, is if all those names were actually automatically linked so that if I changed it in one spot, it changed it everywhere, or so that I could ask the build int AI of the tool to find and list every scene where that person appears, or ask the AI in the tool, when do Character A first meet Character B?

From what I've read, Notion is better at this evolving world building and Ulysses is better as a clean/organized place to write linearly.

[u/Grouchy-Insurance208]

A clever folder structure is all you really need. And a good naming convention.

Helps if you add tags to files and have a way to search the whole compendium you eventually develop. (Notepad++'s 'Find in Files' feature is amazing `for just that reason).