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Q&A How to keep track of characters' location, within a longer narrative?

Looks like I came up with my own approach in the end. At least, nobody seems to have mentioned it. LibreOffice Writer (and probably most other word processors) supports adding comments. They are d...

posted 5y ago by Canina‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-11T18:55:50Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41170
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T06:57:00Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/41170
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by (deleted user) · 2019-12-08T06:57:00Z (over 4 years ago)
Looks like I came up with my own approach in the end. At least, nobody seems to have mentioned it.

LibreOffice Writer (and probably most other word processors) supports adding _comments_. They are displayed in the sidebar, exist outside of the text itself, yet are attached to a location in the text (so, for example, flow with the text).

**What I ended up doing was to, whenever a character moves to a new location, I add a (very) brief comment that lists the characters per location.**

Especially since I don't need to track a large number of locations and write _mostly_ (but not exclusively) chronologically, this works nicely for me.

If I find myself wondering where someone is, I'll just scroll up to the most recent comment, and look for the name of the character.

If I need a character to be in a new location, I'll write whatever makes sense in the prose so that they are now in the new location, then copy the most recent comment and move their name from where they were previously to where they need to be.

This also has the bonus feature that deleting all comments is just two clicks from any comment.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2019-01-09T21:47:11Z (over 5 years ago)
Original score: 1