I’ve been sort of stuck at a point in my story that I’m working on. I needed to organize large groups of characters and sort of take each group off in different directions.
I use a spreadsheet to keep track of details on this particular story. It helps me keep track of my large cast of characters, locations, “magic” words, and a variety of other things. At one point I split the characters into squads led by three different people. I didn’t want to mess up and say someone was in two places when they were geographically split up.
Now I’m at a point where the leader of the whole thing is going in one direction and his right hand woman is being sent somewhere else. So I had to take the time to look at my characters and determine who was going where.
The other thing is the group as a whole had to grow significantly. I had to find a way to have that happen without having to keep track of another hundred characters. So I have a group of nameless characters that I can bring into the mix as I go. I’m not putting names to them until I start writing about them. It will be easier that way. I won’t have the overwhelming task of coming up with all the names and details about them until I need to use them in the story.
Now all I need is a good weekend or so to work on the next few chapters. I know what I want each group to do but the details need to be worked on. If I can pull it off the way I think I will, it will be really good.
The friend I have reading it has caught up to me and wants more so I’m taking that as a good sign. I need to get more down on paper to finish the story and to get the rest of it to her.