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Today’s Alpennia blog is courtesy of @quartzen on Twitter who asked about how I use my name/vocabulary spreadsheets in my editing process.
I’ve mentioned that one important first step when I start serious revisions is to track all the personal names, locations, and specialized terminology (or invented words) that I’ve used. One reason, of course, is to make sure that I don’t end up calling a character two different things. It’s also a good way of keeping track of whether I’ve used a name more than once (without intending to--deliberate repetition is ok) and to keep an eye on the balance of which initials are appearing with what frequency in my names. But another significant function for this process is to take note of which chapters each name/term appears in, so that I can make sure to identify and describe the person or place the first time they show up, and to remind readers about them if there’s been too long a gap between mentions. I also use my spreadsheets to track a number of characteristics and very brief descriptions, both of people and places, to avoid contradiction and continuity errors.
With all that in mind, what are the practical details of my spreadsheets? I started out keeping everything in a single table, but with Mother of Souls that was becoming unwieldy and I broke it out to three separate tables: people, places, and other. The “people” table has the most detail, and in some previous projects I haven’t done the extensive chapter-by-chapter mentions-tracking for all categories. The place/vocabulary items may have just a single column for each book/story indicating whether that item appears and which chapter it first appears in.
Why do I need spreadsheets at all? Mostly because--despite my skill at holding large numbers of details in my head--the amount of data is massive enough that I need help. The Alpennia series so far has entries for 175 separate places (including real-world places that are mentioned), of which 103 are mentioned in Mother of Souls.
My cumulative table has 431 separate listings for people of which about 200 appear in Mother of Souls (half of them appear in only a single chapter).To be fair, in this includes items like real-world historic personages mentioned as background, authors of books referenced only once, and in some cases a family name is listed separately from the individuals which artificially increases the count.
The “other” vocabulary category includes 200 items (about 85 mentioned in Mother of Souls), which includes invented Alpennian vocabulary, specialized technical terms (concerning mysteries or alchemy, etc.), and other things like book and opera titles, first lines of poems and songs, and anything else I might conveniently want to track.
I suppose one might ask whether it’s necessary to give names to quite so many people and places when they only get mentioned in passing. But for me this is equivalent to sensory descriptions (which I have to work harder at than names). Every person in my world has a name, after all. Especially given that the story is written from a fairly tight point-of-view, one would expect my characters to think about and refer to each other by name, rather than by description.
When Jeanne tells someone that her cook has a secret recipe for roast duck, it makes sense for her to simply refer to “my cook”, but when Luzie has an extended conversation with her cook (whom she has known since she was a little girl) it wouldn’t make any sense at all for the description to refer to her as “the cook”. Mefro Chisillic not only has a formal name, but the childish pet-name that Luzie usually addresses her by.
Keeping track of everyone's names also gives me a set of pre-existing minor background characters to draw on. Even if readers don’t have any recollection of previously encountering the man at the ball that Barbara is dancing with, it helps provide a sense of “realness” to the setting that underlays the more prominent parts of the story. The failure mode of this approach, of course, is if readers assume that a named character must, by definition, be significant. And if they wrack their brains trying to remember who this one-mentioned dance partner is and what they should know about him.
About half (ca. 100) of the specific persons mentioned in Mother of Souls are new to this book, and 60 of those appear in only one chapter. And, quite frankly, this is the set of persons who get serious scrutiny at this point. For some, there’s a strong need for the person to be named, despite their fleeting appearance. Some, although listed as distinct individuals in the spreadsheet, are in fact mentioned only by reference: a wife, a mother, a husband. For example, Luzie's mother is referred to as "my mother" from Luzie's point of view, and as "Maisetra Ovimen" by other people, but I haven't had a need to give her a first name. So once we've established that Luzie's maiden name is Ovimen, counting her mother as a separate entity doesn't actually increase the number of names that readers must keep track of.
I’ve already changed one reference to “your governess” rather than giving the woman’s name. There may be similar reductions in complexity (however minor). But without tracking the data, I won’t necessarily remember that a particular character can be treated this way. And just because a character is minor in the current book doesn't mean it would make sense to treat them as generic. As a random example, Margerit’s lady’s maid only gets mentioned in two places in Mother of Souls, but she’s a solidly established character in previous books (especially the first) and so it would feel very odd to demote her to unnamed status. LeFevre's secretary Iannipirt is mentioned only once in the current book, in the course of a conversation between LeFevre and Barbara. In part, this is because LeFevre himself isn't on stage much. But Ianni's established character is such that it wouldn't make sense for him to be referred to as "my secretary" in a private conversation between those two characters.
What else do I do with my spreadsheet? I track the following characteristics in their own columns: social rank, gender, and social circle (whose friends are they?). Also, is this a contemporary Alpennian figure, a historic figure, or a real-world person? (In the case of casually-mentioned authors of books, I can easily lose track of this!)
When I first set up the spreadsheet for Daughter of Mystery, I also tracked where people lived, and split out the social circles in more detail. (This got unwieldy.) Other than these characteristic-tags, the core identification data centers around five fields: given name, surname, title of rank (if any), name associated with the title (if any), and a description field explaining who this person is, what their relationships are, and what their significance to the story is. (This last gets updated regularly.) Providing an example gets a bit tricky if I’m avoiding spoilers, but this should be safe:
Mihail * Lumbeirt * Baron * Saveze * Marziel Lumbeirt’s older brother who died at the battle of Tarnzais
What does all this tracking get me? Well, for example, when I want to choose someone from Jeanne de Cherdillac’s discreet social circle of women inclined toward women, who is not currently part of a stable couple, and who is a member of the middle class, because I need someone to have a casual affair with another (female) character, I filter on “Social Circle contains J”, on “Rank = M”, on “gender = F”, and then read through the resulting 6 entries to eliminate the three straight women and the one who’s in a long-term couple, leaving me two options for further consideration. (I don’t actually have a code for sexual orientation. So far I can keep track of that!)
Another thing I can do is filter to identify every “significant” character (e.g., characters who appear in more than a specified number of chapters in any single work) and keep track of both their given name and first initial. This gives me a quick at-a-glance reference for knowing that the series has 10 significant characters whose first names start with “Ch”, and 8 that start with “A”, but that I have no significant characters whose names start with “N”, “O”, or “V”. It also helps me verify that I haven't entirely repeated a given name for a significant character unless it was a deliberate choice (as with the Annas and Elisebets). This doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes find myself changing a new character’s name because they’ve ended up in the same scene as a minor character with a similar name. But it does help keep a better balance.
The spreadsheets aren’t my only tool, of course. I also keep files with clips of physical description and “reference images” (usually period paintings) that I use to keep their appearance aligned and to inspire me when I have no idea how to describe them. (This is a known weakness, but I’m working on it.) And for the editing process I also use a spreadsheet as a chapter-by-chapter checklist for all the standard things I need to address in revisions. About which I will talk more in a later blog.
I’ve mentioned that one important first step when I start serious revisions is to track all the personal names, locations, and specialized terminology (or invented words) that I’ve used. One reason, of course, is to make sure that I don’t end up calling a character two different things. It’s also a good way of keeping track of whether I’ve used a name more than once (without intending to--deliberate repetition is ok) and to keep an eye on the balance of which initials are appearing with what frequency in my names. But another significant function for this process is to take note of which chapters each name/term appears in, so that I can make sure to identify and describe the person or place the first time they show up, and to remind readers about them if there’s been too long a gap between mentions. I also use my spreadsheets to track a number of characteristics and very brief descriptions, both of people and places, to avoid contradiction and continuity errors.
With all that in mind, what are the practical details of my spreadsheets? I started out keeping everything in a single table, but with Mother of Souls that was becoming unwieldy and I broke it out to three separate tables: people, places, and other. The “people” table has the most detail, and in some previous projects I haven’t done the extensive chapter-by-chapter mentions-tracking for all categories. The place/vocabulary items may have just a single column for each book/story indicating whether that item appears and which chapter it first appears in.
Why do I need spreadsheets at all? Mostly because--despite my skill at holding large numbers of details in my head--the amount of data is massive enough that I need help. The Alpennia series so far has entries for 175 separate places (including real-world places that are mentioned), of which 103 are mentioned in Mother of Souls.
My cumulative table has 431 separate listings for people of which about 200 appear in Mother of Souls (half of them appear in only a single chapter).To be fair, in this includes items like real-world historic personages mentioned as background, authors of books referenced only once, and in some cases a family name is listed separately from the individuals which artificially increases the count.
The “other” vocabulary category includes 200 items (about 85 mentioned in Mother of Souls), which includes invented Alpennian vocabulary, specialized technical terms (concerning mysteries or alchemy, etc.), and other things like book and opera titles, first lines of poems and songs, and anything else I might conveniently want to track.
I suppose one might ask whether it’s necessary to give names to quite so many people and places when they only get mentioned in passing. But for me this is equivalent to sensory descriptions (which I have to work harder at than names). Every person in my world has a name, after all. Especially given that the story is written from a fairly tight point-of-view, one would expect my characters to think about and refer to each other by name, rather than by description.
When Jeanne tells someone that her cook has a secret recipe for roast duck, it makes sense for her to simply refer to “my cook”, but when Luzie has an extended conversation with her cook (whom she has known since she was a little girl) it wouldn’t make any sense at all for the description to refer to her as “the cook”. Mefro Chisillic not only has a formal name, but the childish pet-name that Luzie usually addresses her by.
Keeping track of everyone's names also gives me a set of pre-existing minor background characters to draw on. Even if readers don’t have any recollection of previously encountering the man at the ball that Barbara is dancing with, it helps provide a sense of “realness” to the setting that underlays the more prominent parts of the story. The failure mode of this approach, of course, is if readers assume that a named character must, by definition, be significant. And if they wrack their brains trying to remember who this one-mentioned dance partner is and what they should know about him.
About half (ca. 100) of the specific persons mentioned in Mother of Souls are new to this book, and 60 of those appear in only one chapter. And, quite frankly, this is the set of persons who get serious scrutiny at this point. For some, there’s a strong need for the person to be named, despite their fleeting appearance. Some, although listed as distinct individuals in the spreadsheet, are in fact mentioned only by reference: a wife, a mother, a husband. For example, Luzie's mother is referred to as "my mother" from Luzie's point of view, and as "Maisetra Ovimen" by other people, but I haven't had a need to give her a first name. So once we've established that Luzie's maiden name is Ovimen, counting her mother as a separate entity doesn't actually increase the number of names that readers must keep track of.
I’ve already changed one reference to “your governess” rather than giving the woman’s name. There may be similar reductions in complexity (however minor). But without tracking the data, I won’t necessarily remember that a particular character can be treated this way. And just because a character is minor in the current book doesn't mean it would make sense to treat them as generic. As a random example, Margerit’s lady’s maid only gets mentioned in two places in Mother of Souls, but she’s a solidly established character in previous books (especially the first) and so it would feel very odd to demote her to unnamed status. LeFevre's secretary Iannipirt is mentioned only once in the current book, in the course of a conversation between LeFevre and Barbara. In part, this is because LeFevre himself isn't on stage much. But Ianni's established character is such that it wouldn't make sense for him to be referred to as "my secretary" in a private conversation between those two characters.
What else do I do with my spreadsheet? I track the following characteristics in their own columns: social rank, gender, and social circle (whose friends are they?). Also, is this a contemporary Alpennian figure, a historic figure, or a real-world person? (In the case of casually-mentioned authors of books, I can easily lose track of this!)
When I first set up the spreadsheet for Daughter of Mystery, I also tracked where people lived, and split out the social circles in more detail. (This got unwieldy.) Other than these characteristic-tags, the core identification data centers around five fields: given name, surname, title of rank (if any), name associated with the title (if any), and a description field explaining who this person is, what their relationships are, and what their significance to the story is. (This last gets updated regularly.) Providing an example gets a bit tricky if I’m avoiding spoilers, but this should be safe:
Mihail * Lumbeirt * Baron * Saveze * Marziel Lumbeirt’s older brother who died at the battle of Tarnzais
What does all this tracking get me? Well, for example, when I want to choose someone from Jeanne de Cherdillac’s discreet social circle of women inclined toward women, who is not currently part of a stable couple, and who is a member of the middle class, because I need someone to have a casual affair with another (female) character, I filter on “Social Circle contains J”, on “Rank = M”, on “gender = F”, and then read through the resulting 6 entries to eliminate the three straight women and the one who’s in a long-term couple, leaving me two options for further consideration. (I don’t actually have a code for sexual orientation. So far I can keep track of that!)
Another thing I can do is filter to identify every “significant” character (e.g., characters who appear in more than a specified number of chapters in any single work) and keep track of both their given name and first initial. This gives me a quick at-a-glance reference for knowing that the series has 10 significant characters whose first names start with “Ch”, and 8 that start with “A”, but that I have no significant characters whose names start with “N”, “O”, or “V”. It also helps me verify that I haven't entirely repeated a given name for a significant character unless it was a deliberate choice (as with the Annas and Elisebets). This doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes find myself changing a new character’s name because they’ve ended up in the same scene as a minor character with a similar name. But it does help keep a better balance.
The spreadsheets aren’t my only tool, of course. I also keep files with clips of physical description and “reference images” (usually period paintings) that I use to keep their appearance aligned and to inspire me when I have no idea how to describe them. (This is a known weakness, but I’m working on it.) And for the editing process I also use a spreadsheet as a chapter-by-chapter checklist for all the standard things I need to address in revisions. About which I will talk more in a later blog.
