How to Track What Each Character Knows (and When They Learned It)

A common issue I often encountered in my writing is tracking when characters learn information. Especially when going back and revising my manuscript, often my memory is polluted by facts I’ve developed later in the narrative.

This problem is probably familiar to you as well, especially if you are crafting complex and detailed worlds with multiple characters who all have their own individual knowledge states throughout your story. That knowledge path for each character grows in complexity, especially if you have things like flashbacks, a non-linear narrative, or changes to a character’s memory as time progresses.

That all boils down into a question that is easy to ask, but difficult to answer: What does this character know at the current moment in my story?

The approach I use is to record important changes in a character’s knowledge against the scene where they happen. I do not try to catalog everything a character knows. I track the beliefs, discoveries, and misunderstandings that later scenes depend on, then bring those notes forward as I work through the manuscript.

Knowledge is Not Simply True or False

At any given moment in your timeline, countless number of facts can be objectively true. Things like: The location of a key character, or the fact a starship has run out of fuel, or maybe Trica is having lunch with her best friend.

But the objectivity of those facts is not always known to all perspectives in your narrative. Using the spaceship fuel as an example; maybe you are drafting a scene where people in the lower decks already know the ship is adrift with no propulsion; but the captain and bridge crew don’t know yet, because of a faulty display readout. Maybe some of the maintenance crew is aware of the lack of fuel, but since the bridge crew hasn’t confirmed it yet, they are uncertain if their equipment is reading out correctly. Or perhaps they think there are reserve stores of fuel in the cargo hold, and only the logistics crew knows that the fuel reserves were transferred off the ship at their last dry-dock since this was a short agile mission.

Each of those characters holds a model of the world in their mind that you are building out in your narrative; and to make the manuscript convincing they all need to act convincingly based on the knowledge the reader sees them possessing from moment to moment.

For some writers, this problem is not at the forefront because the interconnectedness of facts like our spaceship example are not necessarily core to the story or not as complex as I’ve drafted in my example. But especially for genres surrounding mystery or technical detail; the layers of knowledge and what characters know about what is objectively true can be a massive web of nuanced beliefs.

Recording Changes, Not Entire Minds

The principle I like to work with is: I don’t need to know everything about a character from cover-to-cover while editing a scene in the middle of the manuscript. I just need to know key knowledge states and track how they change in relevant places.

In a way, this is a parallel to what a manuscript is. Fiction is, after all, telling a reader about the state of the world you are building, bound to time. The problem with that is: What all your characters know at any given moment isn’t always spelled out for the reader, nor should it be (obviously). And if Hurley from the maintenance department is going to be a key character and his knowledge matters before his role as a key character is revealed, then it’s entirely possible to forget what he knew, and when.

In my own writing, I’ve found this is especially true in first-person narratives. I often try to use perspective shifts exceedingly sparingly. And because of that, supporting characters or even deuteragonists’ thoughts, feelings, motives, and beliefs are not apparent to the reader.

The Problem Compounds During Revision

Character knowledge isn’t just a forward moving challenge. During revision of previous scenes, you, as the author, are tasked with writing from character perspectives that have effectively reverted backwards in time. But your knowledge hasn’t been restricted to only what those characters know.

In my case, even if I consciously know that a character doesn’t know a specific set of facts yet, the knowledge that those changes are coming can subtly influence my writing for them during the process of editing and refining my earlier scenes. It is very difficult for me to write a character who has full trust in another, not knowing that a chapter or two later they will be betrayed by that same character.

That is why, for me, framing the character’s knowledge is so important. It’s not just what they don’t know yet, but what they do know, presently. Which is part of what Scriptri is designed to help solve. Allowing you, as the author, to record key discrete beliefs and knowledge bound to the scene where the character changes their belief from one state to another. Then that state can move forward through the timeline with the character.

A Lightweight Way to Track Knowledge State

I’ve found that a really good framework for working through this issue is to not attempt to anticipate the importance of every continuous knowledge state for each character. Rather, what matters is identifying the knowledge that most affects who the character is and how they develop through the narrative. When a piece of knowledge becomes important for character development or narrative weight, record it against the characters most affected by it. Especially if their knowledge of the fact doesn’t match the objective reality of the fact.

But it’s a balancing act. It is easy to get overwhelmed with just how complex each of your characters is. Especially if you’ve carefully built out detailed information about the timeline and characters and world before you’ve started drafting.

Just hold onto this: You don’t need to record every detail that a character learns or believes. Focus on the information that affects how the character develops or acts. Sometimes its importance will not become apparent until later in the draft.

When that happens to me, I tend to pause and go back in my manuscript scenes and record the relevant state and continuity changes for the key characters; then resume drafting from there. Often the process I do takes at most a few minutes to record a few sentences, then I’m back to editing.

How Scriptri Helps

There are multiple ways to track state changes. But, if you are like me, having access to relevant character data that is bound to the context of the present place in the manuscript is better than trying to track disparate states for all my characters mentally or in notes documents. And that is one of Scriptri’s core competencies.

The way it works is that Scriptri allows you to record notes, per-entity, bound to the scenes in your manuscript. When the entity is present in a later scene, Scriptri can bring forward the notes associated with it through that point in the manuscript (either via mention in the text, or as an explicit addition to the scene metadata).

The process is not magic, it’s just a structured way to record and display data in a way that gives you, as the author, the ability to frame what matters to you and set the context for the information you need to craft your narrative.

As I build Scriptri, there are always new surfaces and areas of improvement I discover, either through thinking through these continuity and state problems. Or in my own writing projects (yes, I use Scriptri for my projects). If this problem sounds familiar, try out Scriptri. And if you find gaps in how you think it ought to work, let me know!