Tag Archives: Character Relationship Map

Link-Chart Your Story

Link charts—I know you’ve seen them. Big, poster-size charts with pictures and words, arrows and colored threads connecting things. Complex, but visually stunning. Could you use one to write your novel?

You’ve seen link charts on shows featuring detectives and others with basement conspiracy theorists. You may have seen two of them on a TV ad for CarGurus. Note: I’m neither endorsing nor disparaging CarGurus.

From what I understand, real-life detectives rarely, if ever, use link charts. But TV and movie detectives do, for two simple reasons. Link charts convey, in one picture, that the detective’s done a lot of work, and they show, at a single glance, a lot of relationships between people and things. They make for a great visual in a visual medium.

That second property may prove useful to you. If you’re writing a novel, you’re keeping track of many characters, settings, events, etc. To organize that data, you most likely think like a writer and write it all down—on sticky notes, index cards, notepaper in three-ring binders, computer files, online wikis, etc. You waste considerable time wading through your files to track down something you half-remember writing months ago.

At such times, you might wish you could have it all handy, in one place. A link chart might help. You’ve seen TV sleuths stare at their charts and snap their fingers, and you know they’ve just solved the case. Staring at a big picture of your novel might aid you, too.

Some years ago, I learned some of the data visualization principles espoused by Edward Tufte. He advocates data-rich illustrations that present all the data. Often these get very complex, but backing up from their complexity, a viewer discerns patterns, relationships, and trends. Tufte’s illustrations represent gestalts, greater than the sum of their parts.

I don’t know what Tufte would make of link charts in particular, but a well-made link chart can satisfy Tufte’s principles of visually representing data.

How might you set up a link chart for the novel you’re writing? Here are some ideas:

In the CarGurus TV commercial, the woman knows a quicker way for the man to get the car he wants, implying the link charts just wasted his time. However, until someone comes up with a NovelGuru app that writes a novel for you (c’mon, app developers, get on that!), a link chart might prove beneficial.

If you do develop your own link chart, consider hiding it so nobody else sees the thing without you being present to explain it. Someone happening upon your link chart might suspect you’re hunting for Big Foot, correlating UFO sightings, or planning a real-life murder.

Unless, of course, you’d rather have them think you’re doing those things, than writing a novel!

Whatever link chart you make, do not connect any threads between Big Foot, UFOs, or murders to—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 17, 2021Permalink

Character Relationship Maps

Try as you might, some of you can’t help but read my blog. Perhaps it’s like a horrible highway accident; you just can’t avert your eyes. You regular readers know, then, that my mind favors images, graphs, and pictorial displays, and that’s what I’ve got going on today.

It isn’t that I disdain text; I am a writer, after all. It’s just that a picture is worth a thousand words, so when I need information in a condensed form, it’s hard to beat a graphical chart.

When a writer sets out to craft a story, it can be difficult to keep all the characters in mind. One technique for doing so is to use a Character Relationship Map (CRM). Like a mind map and Root Cause Analysis motivation chart, this map is something for your use alone. No reader will see it, so you can make up your own format.

Star Wars Character Relationship MapThe one I’m showing here, for the first Star Wars movie, A New Hope (Episode IV), is for illustrative purposes only and is not complete or necessarily accurate. My only intent is to show one possible example for a case familiar to most readers. To see many other sample Character Relationship Maps, do an Internet search for that term and click on images.

The CRM depicts, on a single page, all the relationships between all your story’s characters, or at least the major ones. Having this map before you as you write the story will help you keep these relationships in mind. Note that your story must contain written evidence of each relationship. If not, the reader will not know the relationship exists.

Another advantage of a Character Relationship Map is to ensure you create and understand the relationships yourself. Each major character should have some arrows going out and some going in. Each major character should have arrows connecting to all other major characters.

You might think a CRM would be useful only for novels, or other stories with plenty of characters. However, such maps can be helpful even for short stories with as few as two characters. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, you could connect two characters with four relationships using four lines. Use one line to depict how Character A feels about Character B internally, another line to show how A behaves toward B externally, and two more lines to represent the internal feelings and external behavior of B toward A.

Relationships can be complex. A good author shows some amount of friction, or at least tension, between even the friendliest or most loving characters. Why? Conflict is central to fiction. No two characters are alike, so they will think differently and there will be some level of uncertainty, some speck of doubt or occasional distaste even between the closest and most devoted characters.

To make your CRM more beneficial to you, consider using colors and line thicknesses or shapes to represent other aspects of characters and relationships. For example, you could use box colors to represent character gender, where they stand on the good-evil spectrum, or some other attribute. You could use line thickness to indicate the intensity of the relationship. You could use line shape to indicate the type of relationship, perhaps curved lines for friendship and jagged lines for enmity.

Characters, and their relationships, change through the story. You could show that by means of two maps, one showing the before state, and the other the after state. Or you could find some method of picturing the change on a single map.

Have you used a Character Relationship Map? If so, did you find it helpful? Leave a comment for a rather colorful character known as—

Poseidon’s Scribe

January 10, 2016Permalink