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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/29936
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/29936
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I'm currently working on a piece which has characters coming and going. Basically, sometimes a side character is near the main (also point-of-view) character, and sometimes that same side character is somewhere else. To give you an idea of its length, it's currently about 23,000 words of English prose, and it's about half done from the perspective of the time period I want to cover in the finished piece.

Every time I want to refer to one of the side characters, I have to scroll (or search) back in the text in order to see whether the main character would actually be able to see what the particular side character is doing or not, or whether the side character is nearby or not, just to ensure that a character doesn't show up when they are already there or leave when they're already away. This gets old really quickly, and it's even worse when the characters aren't referred to by name in the prose.

- What's a good way to keep track of **where** a character is, throughout a longer narrative?

For my writing, I'm using LibreOffice Writer (which, for those not familiar with it, is basically your run-of-the-mill page-oriented word processor). I did try Scrivener for a while since just about everyone here seems enthusiastic about it, but it just didn't work all that well for me, so please don't suggest that I move to that.

I'm happy with using a separate tool if that's the best way, but I do want something that doesn't take inordinate amounts of effort to keep in sync with the text I'm working on.

Original score: 5