Hello!
I have scoured the forums and the tutorials all morning but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. Is there a way to create a list of all of the times a character appears in a novel? Theoretically I would like to have a page for each character that has the locations in the manuscript where they appear and by clicking on the location, I could jump to it in the manuscript. If this isn’t possible a simple list would work for me. I know there are tags and metadata, but I can’t figure out how to use those for what I am trying to do.
My closest solution for this is Collections. Instead of a list, it filters the manuscript so only the pages containing the required character(s) appear.
(Caveat; I’m a screenwriter, so my approach may be different than what you would do for a novel.)
For example, I can make a collection that looks for Luke and Leia, and then I get only the pages where they both appear.
This is what I do:
I create two Keywords per character. Each keyword has no spaces* in it, and denotes the presence of a character, or the mention of that character when someone (including the narrator) talks about someone who isn’t in the scene.
As I write or edit, I keep the outline or inspector keywords pane open, adding the relevant keywords as needed.
When I want to view all of the documents where a character is present, I open the keywords window, select their keyword, and use the search tool on that window. It will bring up all documents tagged with that keyword.
I also add both keywords to that character’s “Sketch” document. In general, it’s a place to keep track of character’s full names, relevant physical characteristics, a snippet of dialogue to remind me of their “voice”, etc…
I don’t normally do this, but if you want a central hub of links to documents where a character appears in your story, create a character sketch doc for each character. Then create a bookmark to or from that document to the files where they appear in your story. If you have your preferences set to create back-links (Behaviors->Document Links->Document links and bookmarks create back-link bookmarks), then you’ll end up with a document that is linked to every other document where they appear, and each of those documents will link to your character sketch.
I suggest you experiment with these features in a dummy project first. When you’re confident you know how this all works together, you can decide how to add it to any existing project(s).
[size=85]* The no-spaces rule is so that searching for “John Smith” keywords doesn’t turn up every keyword with either John or Smith in it. There are ways around that, but it’s far easier to just write your keyword “JohnSmith-present” or “John_Smith-mentioned”. You can alway edit the master keywords list to modify how they’re written if you need to, so it’s not super important to get this “right” until you’re doing searches.[/size]