Keeping track of the story details
I've heard about authors trying to keep track of the details of their stories and I always wondered how difficult that actually was. After all, I read their stories and was able to track all kinds of details in them. Of course, I was reading the finished book and I read my favorite books repeatedly. It turns out that the actual authors were correct and I was completely wrong in my impression. It's really difficult to keep this stuff straight. Here's some of the things I've observed so far.
First, I'm trying to create people, places, and events that never happened. I'm kicking around different ideas. Will this person do this or that? How will people respond to their actions? All these ideas get jumbled up in my head and I find myself wondering what I actually wrote down. For example, I have to keep looking up how long Mack has been out of his country. I picture it being maybe a year or so, but he's actually been in the army his entire adult life. The war has gone on for a lot of those years. When I want to refer to his time out of country, I find myself looking at what I had already written to keep the timeline straight.
Second, it's difficult to keep some things consistent when you don't remember everything you were thinking three weeks ago. I may have a different take on things now and I'd like to adjust the story some. That means I need to go back and find what I did before and fix it. Or at least make a comment in the document so I can review it later during the edits.
Finally, I realize that this is only going to get worse the longer the book goes. I'm only at 7,500 words or so. My target is around 100,000 words. It's going to get really difficult to look things up in my Word document when I'm 60,000 words into things!
I've found myself considering some of the commercial applications to help authors write their books. Primarily, so that I can create notes that I can easily search for later. I'm rubbish at maintaining a consistent note taking method, or any other organizational method. One of the things that I love about Gmail is that it is so easy to search in. I just archive emails and when I need to find some information later, I search for it.
**Brief pause to try something out**
I just tried using Microsoft Copilot in Word to query for information about the story. For example, I asked it when Mack and Wes were first able to get some food after they escaped from the POW camp. It gave me a pretty good response. I did notice that it isn't able to tell me what page this happened on because I don't have page numbers in the text. That seems kind of weird, since Word is obviously splitting the document up into pages on its own. Not a fatal flaw though.
Regardless, I have some more experimentation to do around this. I'd really like to be able to search my notes and the book for answers in one place. I thought about setting up a wiki to do this, but I'd rather not get bogged down into maintaining a web site of stuff. Some commercial apps may be able to do all this easily, but I'm also concerned about getting my data out of it if I ever needed to. The last thing I want to do is have a massive, manual project to copy everything out of a platform because I needed to move my data.
Perhaps the writing fairy will give me a magical answer to this. In the mean time, I'll keep looking for a solution rather than waiting on her to answer my plea.
Book status
Mack Hawthorne is at 7.5%.