by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
My fiction characters are running amuck. Even with the best of intentions, I realized they were getting beyond me in the current book. Remembered a tool author Linda Needham told me about. She has a humongous whiteboard in her office and uses different colored sticky notes to represent the characters in each chapter. That way she can see who is where.
My whiteboard is on the small size, so not enough room. I decided to use an Excel spreadsheet instead. Now, I’m one of the those right brains who would rather dig slit trenches than use Excel, but I’ve learned détente. Actually, the thought of using different colors really won me over.
Gathered up my horde of highlighter pens and crayons and off I went. Put chapter numbers on the top and lines for character names and colors on the side. Then I proceeded to start from chapter one and work my way through the manuscript. Using 8 1/2″ x 14″ paper I can get about 27 chapters on a sheet.
Each character is assigned their own color. Also came up with the idea to draw a circle when a character is mentioned so I can fix or expand that on editing. Managed to get about 17 chapters dissected this past weekend. Found out I had more walk-on characters than I realized. Seems new people are always jumping into this book.
Not sure I’m getting a true handle on my characters, but it is helping me realize who is where and get reacquainted with all the folks running around on the pages. If this tool works for you, yeah. If not, no problem.
The coloring part is fun. I love the smell of crayons in the afternoon!
You had me with colors…lol. Also, I like that you printed out a hard copy of the spreadsheet to work from, rather than try to manipulate the colors and other data on the screen. A more tactile experience that way. 🙂
Much more fun to color in the boxes! Can’t be too neat about this creative stuff.