Last Updated on January 12, 2025 by Tom Kane
Writing a Novel
As an Indie Author I’ve been asked a few times how I write my historical fiction novels. The simple answer is, I sit down and type whatever comes into my head onto my keyboard and hey presto, I’ve written a book. In truth it’s a lot more complicated than that. As the image above suggests, we start with a pot of plots and go on from there. But again, it’s a lot more complicated than even choosing a plot.
Once you have your plot. Then creating your characters, writing about them and their interactions and giving them a voice is pretty simply… isn’t it? No, of course it isn’t. But again, it’s even more complicated than that once you create more than one novel, with the same characters dotted throughout.
When I wrote my Brittle Saga Trilogy I managed to keep track of all the characters across all three books, and all in my head with no notes to speak of.
Now, I’m writing a nine novel series, The Midnight Series, with, so far, 43 characters appearing across the spectrum of books. How do I keep track? I call it Character Mapping.
Character Mapping
I use MS Excel and have in my left column a list of characters each with a unique colour code. Across the topmost row I have a list of books. In each book’s column, I put in the colour code where a character appears. And so, we end up with the image below which represents the state of play from each character within the book series, where the novel has been written or is being written.
At a glance, I can see where characters appear in my stories. As I add characters I add them to the list, give them a code and the mapping builds over time.
Obviously, books that haven’t been written have little or no interaction with the spreadsheet, though it does show that both Jessie and Frank Fordham appear in all nine books and Kit Fordham appears at the beginning and end of the series. So it’s also quite a useful tool for planning books.
It looks effective and seems to work well. So far so good. Watch this space as I explore the magical world (and hard slog) of writing a nine novel book series.
Copyright Tom Kane © January 2025
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