How do you organize your characters?

[Meridian]

General "how do you track everything with your characters" thread


Currently I do a mixture of google docs, txt files, notes in my head, and ways to trigger the latter through the former.
Annnd what I've been trying to do last week is take inventory for my upcoming pkmn fics and start creating Toyhou.se profiles for them.
Mostly just dunking basic bio descriptions into one private folder until I make each character a profile.

For those not aware Toyhou.se is website where people make profiles for their characters as a way to track info, inform others, and even do things like character trades or adopt sales. A similar website was Charahub, which died sometime last year if I remember right. May have been early this year. Sorry to those who had an old account.

 

[StellarWind]

At this point I'm pretty sure I stopped even trying to keep track of all my weird brain children as there are generally too many of them across multiple continuities and many of which were generated for RPs that have long since faded. So most of my characters are scattered in a semi-completed state across numerous discussion threads. Some of them actually have bio threads of their own in the corpse of a forum I've once put up on my server and currently use exclusively as a project aggregator, and characters directly linked to my fan region project have wiki pages in various states of completion. Between that and assorted text files scattered on my computer and echoes in my head of concepts I've intended to implement for particular characters...

Yeah. I guess my characters are as generally "organized" as everything else in my neural cores is. xD

As for Toyhou.se, last I checked it was invite-only - so the likelihood of me ever using it is essentially negative. I've seen other services out there with similar premises, but all of which were paywalled as all frell and I am largely unimpressed with such. >>;

 

[canisaries]

oh wow i'd completely forgotten about charahub, looks like the world did too...

For my absolutely most fleshed out character, that being Red, I have a GDoc that started off as filling in some character information template but got the important addition of a timeline for the stories and important character events. It actually comes into use when I have to keep track of the chronology and seasons and whatnot, but honestly everything else about Red in the doc is extraneous now that Red basically lives in my s o u l

I say everything else "about Red" since there are also small notes on the other characters in the universe which I would say are also reliably available in my memory but I think are still useful to have written down so nothing is lost forever if I happen to forget it.

For non-TPPverse chars, those being the chars in my PMDesque worlds, I have brief descriptions of them listed in the doc notes of the story they're part of. I tend to have pretty distinct characters (and having all be different species helps), so it tends to not be too hard to remember traits and such. If I was writing stories longer than a few chapters, I might have more complex motivations to keep track of, but now it's mostly just pretty simple stuff.

(if there are sentences that don't make sense here it's because i'm forced to listen to christmas music in the background and it's screwing with my brain)

 

[Meridian]

snip

@StellarWind ach! I forgot to say in the OP that Toyhou.se invites are often available like Ao3 invites, through people on sites like reddit, petsites (neopets, flightrising), etc.
The way you're doing it now sounds like it works well for you, but if you ever want to try Toyhou.se there's def people out there giving free invites (and there's a subscription option iirc, but it's extremely optional)
;
@ Canisaries: that's def a good way to do it for both :0

 

[WildBoots]

I use Scrivener for almost everything except timelines. My character notes are fairly simple -- if I can't hold the character arc in my head, it probably needs to be trimmed down. I track basic physical descriptions, teams, core goals and interests, core backstory, and that's about it. All in all, it's maybe a paragraph or two per character.

 

[Chibi Pika]

So I actually used to keep all my fic notes in Zim Desktop Wiki (which is nice: very light program for organizing documents and linking between them, and you can keep it on a flash drive) and I made pages for all of my characters in it. I thought about writing profiles for all of them, but then only ended up doing it for one of them (Sebastian. He got two whole pages.) Now I mostly just use it for throwing backstory details so I don't forget them, details about their Pokemon teams, where they got them, stuff like that.

For stuff that actually happens during the story, I tend to do better having my notes for character arcs in the outline itself so I can see how the beats come up in the story.

 

[Umbramatic]

Mostly Google Docs. Lots and lots of Google docs. I do in fact also have a Toyhou.se that I use to store character art and OC information!

https://toyhou.se/Umbramatic/characters

Feel free to browse. I can also work on getting an invite code for anyone who wants one.

 

[Alira]

*giggles nervously in most info being in the head* Well, I generally try to do a mix of notes and profiles, but in all honesty discord messages either in dms where I've gushed about my characters to the person(often my best friend) or servers where I info dump as much as I can about the characters in a series of messages. That's even assuming I don't keep the info and stuff all in my head like I do alot. *side eyes Megan Lucarina as being a victim of that*

I've got a toyhou.se as well, but I'll be darned if I remember the name I used there, cuz it wasn't Alira that's for sure. I'll try to find it and link it later, assuming it isn't a mess. I'll definitely try to get my ocs on there when I can though.

 

[lisianthus]

I've been meaning to create a Google Doc with my world/characters stuff, but until then it's mostly just in my brain LOL... also in a bunch of Discord channels in a certain writing-based personal server, too...? I think I'll get started on that Google Doc now that I'm done with college stuff for this quarter!

 

[PainterFight]

Either they were located on my headspace or some messy, assorted texts of even messier information. I do want to make a Toyhouse account sometime. Or maybe a Refsheet.

(The assorted texts in question were either google docs or discord messages I didn't share to anyone else.)

 

[Meridian]

hoi hoi, updating my own contribution with that I now use a note taking system called Obsidian, which is a markdown editor.
I prefer offline resources, as I'm not limited to google account storage space or access to the server.
I do need to backup my projects to my other devices so that I could write on mobile

Toyhou.se is something I'm trying to get back to using, and I still recommend it for those with a bunch of OCs.
Like I said, I recommend people doing web searches for codes being given out, as the free features aren't bad.

 

[K_S]

Honestly all my characters start as notes in notebooks or scrap papers... That migrate to word docs... That get put into folders for each setting... That i will then drag from personal computer to a internet worthy unit as time permits , and last step is iplug the charactet notes into the aprop chapters/tale and let them out into the wild of narritive.

 

[Venia Silente]

Good work, people who use offline services! Just to make sure you can always add random notes about your characters even if the internet is down. Modern pen and paper, for a modern age.

I myself use a Dokuwiki wiki to store info about the characters (and pretty much everything else, but here we're talking about the characters). Appearance, moves, lore, hopeful voice acting claims, etc. The public information is kept in the public instance of the wiki which because I'm fun and this is about Pokémon, is hosted at a tropi.us domain. The rest (development, private info, evil alternate selves, etc) is held in my own intranet mirror from which I sync stuff up in parts when I feel like it / when I publish a new story.

For me the main advantage of the wiki model is that I can link stuff with each other organically, which helps a lot when the characters get out in the open and their stories start relating to each other too. Plus it makes it easy to search for stuff and for making corrections such as what age or what evolutive stage did Character Foo have when Event Bar happened. It's not "instantaneous" and admittedly not anywhere as practical as the ideal of using "mind-mapping" software, but the ease of publishing (just sync push local copy of document to public instance) and the fact that I can use the same model and instance for all my cnceptual work (worlds stories, locations, even original Pokémon) helps a lo and offsets various costs.

Other stuff that I can recommend is offline suites like LibreOffice. It has both a word processor (the "obvious part") and also a far less known document masterer, which helps a lot for organizing stuff like stories, or for characters stuff like character bibles / studies. And it has compatibility to upload to some document storage instances, but dunno if Google Docs is among them. Still, GD can import and export to LO formats correctl and witout issues.

As for markdown editors my current preference is Formiko, but pretty much any editor that supports the pandoc renderer and doesn't force live preview mode is fine, since it makes it easy to work in a restricted window / "distractions-free mode" when you are busy or have limited screen space.

And, at the end of the day when you are in a hurry, good ol' notepad.exe still does its job (and it's advantageous for me to use plain text editors since DokuWiki's document engine is text document based, not database based).

 

[Blackjack Gabbiani]

Fantasia Archive. It's a free program similar to a more basic WorldAnvil.

I only use it for my original story though rather than my fanfics.