A writer's guide to herding cats

Keeping track of your characters as you write

As you may know, I have just embarked on writing a new historical crime fiction series - three books planned and a fourth simmering on the back burner - so I am trying to be sensible and behave like a properly organised author. Not at all my normal mode of being, I assure you (unless I’m writing information books, which have an obstinate way of demanding a certain orderliness and rigour).

Generally, when writing fiction, I know where I’m starting from, and I usually have a very clear idea of the last scene - but everything in between is, in the words of Peter Pan, “An awfully big adventure.” Mind you, as Peter Pan was referring to dying when he used those words, perhaps that’s not the most encouraging way to describe the process. In any event, I am pretty much of the Kit de Waal school of writing:

“Make it exist first. Make it good later.”

But, this time, I was about a third of the way through the new book when I realised I had to keep proper tabs on who is who, what they look like, and why they’re there. All that while leaving room for exploration, excitement, and surprises. So I looked around me for tools to help me do this, without putting my imagination in a straitjacket.

Now, I am a great fan of Scrivener as a writing tool, with its flexibility, its appeal to the more visually-minded amongst us, and its minatory but encouraging Project Target, which moves from red through orange to green as you reach the word count you’ve set yourself - but I am not a fan of their Character Sheets, which strike me as somewhat rigid and prescriptive. Nor do I like, as some writers do, finding internet images of people who might look like the characters I am writing about - again, for me, there is a kind of rigidity and falsity about this which I find constricting.

It was only when I looked at the scraps of handwritten notes scattered beside me on my desk that I realised I had my answer. The geography of Victorian London is one of the elements of this story, and I had been downloading images of suitable houses for each of the various characters as I went along. So I put the pictures up on my whiteboard, together with post-it notes with the names and key characteristics of each character I have dealt with to date - and lo and behold, I had a manageable schema to which I can refer, and which gives me a sense of rootedness and control.

That kind of planning works for me - but what works for you? How do you manage your characters? And have you got any particular tips you’d like to share?