I unabashedly love spreadsheets. I view spreadsheets as intelligent pieces of paper: totally freeform, but capable of calculations, lookups, list organization, and even database formats. Spreadsheets are a powerful technology that can externalize mental processes, organization, and memory.

I use spreadsheets for tracking my goals, health, personal finance, RPG games, and all sorts of other things. When I’m writing a novel, I primarily rely on spreadsheets to keep track of characters, scenes, and timelines. Here are a few examples:

Character Guide

When I’m developing main characters I use a text document, not a spreadsheet. But for tracking basic facts about every minor character I introduce, spreadsheets are a huge help. Currently I’m using only four columns:

  • Type of character (main/POV, key, minor, and mentioned)
  • Name/nicknames
  • Location/place of origin
  • Notes (appearance, occupation, relationships to other characters, etc.)

The spreadsheet above is from The Last Crucible, Book 3 of the Reclaimed Earth series. I primarily use it to make sure my spelling is consistent, but also to track any physical details about the character I add to the text.

Chapter/Scene List

When writing The Last Crucible I was working from a detailed synopsis that I had written to secure the book contract. But even though I had a pretty good idea of how the plot was going to unfold, I hadn’t planned every scene. Nor, for me, would that be a good idea; I receive a lot of energy and motivation from not knowing exactly what’s going to happen. Instead, the characters make decisions and I just follow along, doing my best to describe what happens in an interesting way.

I guess, in terms of writing style, that leaves me somewhere between plotting and pantsing. But even though I’m not a meticulous plotter, I find it helpful to maintain a spreadsheet of each scene or chapter. Minor spoiler alert — the sheet below is also from The Last Crucible (amazon smile link).

Columns change depending on the novel, but for the The Last Crucible it was as follows:

  • Chapter
  • POV (book was written in 3rd-person limited)
  • Location (setting)
  • Main events
  • Character needs/obstacles
  • Cliffhanger/suspense (I didn’t end every chapter with a huge cliffhanger, but I tried to at least point to some unresolved tension or question)

When I had good writing momentum, I would sometimes write the chapter first, then come back and fill out the spreadsheet later. But at other times, especially when I deviated from the synopsis, I used this spreadsheet to build up structure for the next few chapters, usually in combination with more detailed notes about forthcoming chapters in the draft text.

In The Sky Woman, Book 1 of Reclaimed Earth and my first ever published novel, I relied on the chapter list spreadsheet more heavily. My earlier unpublished novels had suffered heavily from a lack of character agency, and I wanted to make sure that each main character’s story moved forward, by their own decisions, in each chapter. Eventually I was able to write this way more naturally, but at that point I had to break some bad writing habits. The structure of the spreadsheet helped me stick to my plan.

Spoiler alert — here’s a clipping of my chapter spreadsheet for The Sky Woman. As you can see the book had a different title when I started writing it, before I was aware of the YA series of the same name.

Timeline

While the text of The Reclaimed Earth series does jump around in time a bit, the novel I’m currently working on has a series of events unfold over the course of two years, with many references to things taking a certain number of days or weeks. About halfway through the first draft I started to get overwhelmed by the complexity of overlapping narratives.

It was time for a timeline spreadsheet.

Spoiler alert: the clipping below includes characters and events from my in-progress novel Saint Arcology.

The novel doesn’t start until 2077, but I reference past events in the text, as well as how much time has passed since those events took place. I can’t keep dates in my head AT ALL, so I would have written a mess of it without this spreadsheet.

So that’s a glimpse into my current fiction writing organizational system. Obviously there’s not one best way to write a novel, not even for a particular novelist. Your methods have to change to serve your subject, your own mental state, and so on.

Still, I hope this post can help other writers. Cheers!