Organizing Notes in TSP

Don't worry, I will continue going over my old writing prompts tomorrow, but I'm here with an update on how my WIP The Secret Portal is going.

The past few months, I have been working around the clock on character dynamics. As you've likely noticed, I spent over a month introducing all of the important players in The Secret Portal, so I have a large cast to work with.

"How do you do it?" is the question I get often, and I've made posts before on developing character voice and character dynamics, so you can check that out - the easiest way to get to them is in the "writing advice" section. Because I've talked about this before, I won't get repetitive.

After outlining every single possible dynamic and brainstorming how they could interact with each other in annotations, I transferred all of my annotations to a separate document, where I could more easily organize the information I made under relevant headings: different plotlines, scenes I needed to change, overall notes on characters, etc.

This document is going to be the primary document I will use from now on for notes because there is so much information on The Secret Portal that I have in way too many locations, so to make it easier on myself, I've decided to put everything in one place so I can better synthesize it.

Back in Fall 2021, I made a "Character Cheat Sheet," as I called it, where after I did the MBTI test for all of my characters, I annotated my notes on those into one document where I outlined crucial parts of their personality, applying them to the character and scenes I'd already figured out, and brainstorming some ideas on parts of their personality to emphasize and apply to scenes I'd never thought of before. This helped me get a clearer view of my characters and who they were.

But a lot has changed since Fall 2021. Fall 2022 was spent working on everyone's dynamic with each other, which means a lot of dynamics have changed, which means that document is pretty out of date. However, it has a lot of information on it that I may have forgotten about since, which means that I will be transferring all of the information on that document onto my new primary synthesis document.

I predict I'll be done with this by the first week of February, and the synthesis document will likely get up to over 100 pages, which is slightly overwhelming, but at least things are generally organized for me to figure out enough later. Plus, it will be a new tab to close, which I'm always glad about.

Because I'm putting this under my writing advice section, my advice to everyone is not only to keep everything in one place, but just to make a system that works for you. For me, it was to separate everything at first so I could focus on that one thing, but then to synthesize everything to one place later. If you find that this works for you, I recommend doing it. However, my way of organizing is pretty chaotic, and I don't want to tell anyone how to organize something.

The main thing to take away is to know where everything is, and combining and synthesizing notes on different things is the way I do it, so I can take ideas that I've forgotten about and apply it to something else.

Also, it's worth noting that this is about characters, and characters only. Because The Secret Portal is character-driven, most of the problems I have is with them. Figuring out what makes each one of them tick, separating different notes into different documents to figure out individual aspects of them has been proven helpful. Once I combine all of my notes in different areas, I'm able to synthesize a complex character, as I have a clearer view of how they think, how they talk, and how they interact with the world and people around them.

I'm always willing to answer more specific questions about character building. It's hard, but it's worth it to build an interesting character.

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