TLR When writing a novel; how do you keep track of all kinds of different stuff as an Author, in particular with items, stats, etc. in LitRPG? Do you use some particular tool or huge document? One thing that's annoyed me as a reader is how often Authors will forget stats, items, titles, and so on. For instance, let's say it's a LitRPG or game element novel with stats/attributes, and the MC has 200 strength, then the next chapter or maybe several chapters later MC gets another 20 strength, but the Author will have forgotten how much it was originally and end up say 210 strength instead or something. Or another example, maybe MC is collecting a set of items, and he/she needs 4 of them. But the author forgets that MC already got 3 so MC gets the "3rd" item of the set twice. Thus actually getting 5. So I wonder if there's some good way to have these kinds of information saved. For example different character sheets at different snapshots (Maybe showing MC's stats & skills at level 1, level 5, level 10, level 50, or whatever.), some kind of way to remember what items have been acquired. Events that have happened and relations etc. Like of course, you could technically just have a messy google doc or something, (and I've tried Excel/spreadsheets for character stat pages, which was awful imo.) For events & plot progression stuff I can kind of imagine having some kind of chronological time line with groupings & sub-sections. But idk.
You just gotta keep notes I think. Like JK Rowling for example hand wrote all her stuff in these simple but deep notes that helped her keep track of 7 novels worth of details. http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/...rry-potter-with-a-hand-drawn-spreadsheet.html edit: And a writer's particular writing style will play heavily into how you keep track I would think. Do you have the ending already, are you working from a complete skeleton framework for plotline/character development or just free-writing a plot generally in a direction you've thought of with stuff thrown in on the way? Are you a super organized person outside of writing? I'm not asking you actual questions but these are questions you should be asking yourself I'd say. How you handle these things and the tools, whether its just a way like JKR w Harry Potter of just hand writing stuff or like I'm sure some authors keep intensely detailed spreadsheets/notes in computer files.
Well a lot of novels simply put tables with stats in every chapter, one way to just review them. Or have notes somewhere as the above suggests.
Ai-chan uses different softwares. For character sheet, Ai-chan uses Writeway, it's a novel-writing software with several features which includes character cards, plot organizer and chapter organizer. An equivalent is Scrivener, except that Writeway is free forever now because the programmer has retired. For establishing co-relation, Ai-chan uses a separate software for graphing.
yWriter, personally. I write on an old, secured / neutered Win XP VM, and I needed software that would run on it. : P Alternatively, I've used bibisco and oStorybook as well, meh. Ironically, the 'best' note taker / plot progression tracker I've used turned out to be a monster excel spreadsheet with >20 tabs. It was really useful when plotting with the snowflake method, since chunks were easy to more around as I replotted and refined, and using cell references to consistently add notes, details to watch, and overarching objectives was pretty easy. YMMV. : )
Eh... For one novel I have nothing but a few notes on character backstories (not litrpg), and everything else is in my head. For my other litrpg, most of it is in my head, but i have a few notes in a word doc. Every chap I have an updated version of the MCs (and other major side characters, if applicable) status table, yes in table format. It's a bit of a pain, but it really helps. As for items... Well, my MC's a fork and can't carry anything, so I don't have to worry about that! I also have an excel spreadsheet which houses my level up exp requirement calculator, exp gain from kill of certain level calculator, total exp for a level calculator, stat point gained for specific level calculator, and various other helpful things. As for remembering character appearances, someone's already mentioned it, but dnd character sheet setout would work quite well. I've promised myself that my next novel i'm gonna do a lot of planning beforehand
For the plot, I used literally normal paper and a pencil to build a dynamic timeline as a base and then insert a bunch of random foreshadowing and little details that mattered in the plot. For the character, I also used a normal notebook and a pencil to wrote their personality and what they had. Their end goal and their relationship with others too. I'm not that good at using programs and haven't found any good one for it yet. If anyone had it, please post here. ( Or send it privately to not hijack the thread. )
When I started writing, I thought I could manage with just a note file, but after I got to the 2nd volume I realized I was making too many mistakes. The problem has less to do with linear note taking but non-linear ones. For example, I might get to a point in a story where I wanted the character to be at X stat or X level. So then I have to go back and fix everything. So in volume 2 I switched to a spreadsheet which made things a ton easier BUT, there was simply too much calculating for me to do by the time I got to volume 3 (especially with multiple characters). It was so bad it took me more time to generate a stat window than it took me to write a chapter! So I decided to just program a dynamic calculator and generator for my litrpg. So I made this: (I would change view to side view) https://codepen.io/anon/pen/odXQaR/ Now all I gotta do is enter what a char got into the JSON file timeline and it does everything for me. If I make a change in 1 chapter, the change would retroactively update other chapters and I can just copy and paste. I can also now plan a lot easier for where I want to be by what time. The newer version(not shown in the link above) I also have it calculate damage ranges for me.