Please forgive me if there is a way to do this already and I’ve entirely missed it.
It would be helpful if there was a way to archive the name of characters on a “as you go” basis. This would be useful to keep track of names of peripheral or single appearance players relatively easily. It would also save having to create a character bio for everyone who appears in a story, particularly if there happens to be a lot of them.
Of course, I could just do a better job of keeping track of them myself; I could have created my own document and so on. But as I haven’t so far, I thought I would just suggest and enquire.
Project notes are project-wide and accessible from everywhere. Seems like it might be a good use of that. Not sure whatelse you might have been imagining. It is not as though the software could track this for you. So, one way or another, it is going to be on you to do the recordkeeping on this.
Actually, I can see a way to do this. A feature where you highlight a word in a document, right click, and select, say, “Define Document Keyword” or “Define Project Keyword” would be an ideal solution for this. That way, you keep track of the character names as keywords. Or, better yet, simply a separate keyword list defined within the program as a list of “Characters” or as a “Cast of Characters,” where you right click and say “Define Character,” with each Character definition as a piece of metadata with a further attached piece of metadata being the character’s “Bio” as a textfield. Simple, elegant solution for fiction writers that stays tucked out of the way of other writers who don’t need it.
I like subgeniuszero’s idea of being able to highlight and select a word to be able to add it as a keyword. Yes, it still puts the role of adding the keyword on the writer, but it streamlines the issue and prevents having to click around in numerous windows to perform a simple task and allowing one to resume the actual writing process much sooner.
It’s not possible to have everything in a contextual menu. But what you could do is define a “Characters” group in the keywords list and just drag the character name into it.