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Making a spreadsheet that held the larger narrative was key, especially at the beginning of our work together. Because we are sharing a series, our ideas need to connect. While I’m building out my plots and characters, my writing partner is building his. Although the narrative is flux, I can tell you how my protagonists will grow and change over the next seven books I plan to write.
WRAP TEXT AEON TIMELINE EVENT SERIES
The result of creating this spreadsheet was a deep understanding of the series I’m writing. Each cell is filled with a sentence or two describing what is happening in the character’s life at that time. The result was a spreadsheet that has a row for each character. Somewhere in the middle of my second novel, I took a day to dream about the life I wanted for my five main protagonists. Without one, they would become flat caricatures who never really developed. Sometime around story thirty, it became a personal challenge.ĭoing this made me realize that I needed a long term plan for my main characters. Pulling characters and locations from one story to another was just a game I played with myself. Charting Multi-Book Character ChangeĮven though only two of my three novels are in the same series, all three (and the 50+ short stories I’ve published) all live in the same world. When I go to use a character I haven’t used in awhile, I’ll do a quick check of the sheet to make sure I have the character in my mind. Then I’ll have multiple columns for “backstory.” On the horizontal axis, I have important details like: birthdate, basic appearance, biggest weakness, greatest strength, quirky details, and fatal flaw. On the vertical axis of the sheet, I have character names listed.
My wife would tell you this isn’t surprising at all as I routinely forget my own birthday.įor the current series I’m writing, it’s been helpful to have a spreadsheet to help me remember character details. Often, I forget basic details of their own lives-things like like where they are from, or how they move, or background details I’ve decided to give them on a whim as I write. I have a terrible memory when it comes to my own characters. Right now, here are the ways I use spreadsheets to help plot novels. I’ve been at this for only four years and I’m finishing my fourth novel, so I’m sure this system will look different when I’m publishing book fifty. Making the transition to a spreadsheet system saved me from going crazy and increased my writing speed exponentially. Soon, after a week of swapping ideas, we were spending as much time formatting the Word document as we were writing the actual story. Trying to decide where in the document information went was painful and finding information was worse. It didn’t take long before this Word document became an unruly mess. As I had done with my first novel, these thoughts were transferred to a Word document that we shared through Dropbox. In our spare minutes at work, we would jump online and email each other ideas about the world we were building and the stories we wanted to write. I found myself scrolling and scrolling to find small notes I’d left myself.Īfter finally completing my first novel, I began working on an urban fantasy series with a friend. I tried transferring everything from my whiteboard to a Word document, but formatting became frustrating. Often I would want to change something in the plot, so I’d try to erase it with my fingers, only to remove another note by accident.
To share it with other writers, I’d have to take a picture of it and then write a complicated email explaining all the chicken scratch that I call my handwriting.
I sketched out the idea for my first book on the whiteboard in my office.
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Now that I’ve published three novels, I realize my plots and worlds would never make sense without them.įor more unexpected (and powerful!) tools to include in your book writing software arsenal, check out our Top 10 Pieces of Software for Writers.
WRAP TEXT AEON TIMELINE EVENT HOW TO
I had never thought of how to plan a novel using spreadsheets, whether in Excel, Google Sheets, or any other software program. Before I wrote my first novel, if you’d told me that an important part of my book writing software arsenal would be a good spreadsheet, I would have said you were crazy. While finding a word processing tool you are comfortable with is crucial to writing, there are other types of book writing software that are just as important.
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