Status line, character relationships mapping.

There are a couple of things I thought might be useful.

  1. It’s sometimes hard to keep track of such things as seasons or the time of day, if these are not essential to the story but only put in for descriptive detail. You might mention that it’s autumn in one paragraph and summer a few paragraphs later. I once had characters eat lunch twice on the same day. It might be useful to have a status line at the top of the page to store useful details about the text being currently edited.

  2. When dealing with a large cast of characters, it would be useful to have a chart to keep track of relationships, both familial and other (friends, employers, etc.) The same model could be used for maps of locations. The interactive fiction authoring program Inform 7 uses something like this in generating simple maps from room descriptions; if a room called “forest” is declared to be east of the room called “river”, the program automatically generates a graph of this spatial relationship. Since the same code could be used for both characters and locations, this might be economical.