The Monday Street First Act Character Map

I’ve talked before about character maps. They seem like a complete waste of time–my McDaniel students are never enthusiastic when I assigned them–but they’re the best way I know to see the relationships between and among the characters. Toni and I have added enough characters to the first act of the story that by now that we need a map. Here are the relationships in the first act:

Because there are so many characters to keep track of here (and we haven’t added Krissie’s yet), I did the charts for each act/story and then one for the resolution. It’s a way of seeing that our characters are moving in their relationships, that their situations are changing in the plot, that they won’t be in the same place at the end of the story. If I can chart it, I can see the story move from act to act.

For more about diagramming and charting and generally using pictures in the discovery and organization process, there’s this old questionable. One thing: I state very clearly not to do discovery until you’re done with your first draft, and obviously Toni and I are only starting our drafts. If you’re collaborating, you need to do this stuff early so you both understand each other’s characters and plots. You won’t really understand them until you’ve been through about three revisions of the book, but this kind of visual planning can really help communication among collaborators.

Edited to Add:

Last night Cherry Harpy asked about timelines.

At first, we blocked things out on a table in Word, but we’ve moved onto Curio now. Here’s a Curio chart divided into two columns, blue for Keely and yellow for Cat. I filled in Cat’s tentative stuff and then put it in Dropbox for Toni, but you can see basically what it looks like here:

The green and blue bars that span both columns are times when our characters share a scene, green for Keely and Cat and blue for Rafe and Harry. It’ll be a lot more complex in the third and fourth acts, but for the first two, this will work fine, especially since the stories in the first act take place at the same time. That is, they all start with the same event and then go down their separate paths. Those scene in the boxes will be in both stories that have those characters, they’ll just be told from different POVs, and since the characters are keeping big secrets from each other, the scene should shift dramatically with the PoV change. I have copy of this that’s marked with turning points for the main plot and subplots so I can make sure I’m not dropping anything, and I have notations for conflict and action so I don’t end up with any chat.

Normally, I’d be doing all of this with the second draft, but for a collab, we really need to know what’s going on up front.