How to Track Relationship Changes Across a Novel

Why Relationship Continuity is Difficult

Relationships between characters is one of the foundational reasons Scriptri exists. One of my perpetually in-progress drafts is all about the complex inner workings of an interpersonal romantic relationship. And the reason it is perpetually in-progress and has never come close to completion is because tracking relationship continuity can be incredibly complex and deep.

Fundamentally, the concept should be relatively straight forward. For the kind of interpersonal relationship continuity I am discussing here, I find it useful to begin with the perspectives each character brings to their shared history, expectations, and interactions.

The complexity for tracking relationship continuity comes from two primary places. First, each person has a history and personality that gives them a unique internal perspective on the relationship. Which ties to the second; that each person has varying perspectives on everything around them and how that is contextualized inside the relationship.

I find it’s helpful to ask a simple core question when writing how characters interact within a relationship: What does each character believe about a given topic within the relationship?

A Relationship is Not One Shared State

At their core, each person brings their perspective to a relationship. Whether it’s how they each individually view one-another. How they each view themselves as individuals. Or how they each view topics outside their relationship. Each of those framings can matter when it comes to the continuity and believability of the relationship state in your narrative.

For example, let’s say we have two characters who are in a romantic relationship: Elena and Nathan. Maybe we have a section of our manuscript where Nathan is experiencing self-doubt because he’s recently been injured in a work accident, and as he’s recovering he finds he can’t bench the same amount of weight he once could. From his perspective he’s weakened and vulnerable at that moment in the manuscript.

But if we shift over to Elena’s internal thoughts, maybe we would learn that she views Nathan’s injury and subsequent recovery as evidence of his strength of character. Despite the injury, he got back to work as soon as he was able. And, for her, his drive lives in the context of a man who’s strong and stoic, but gentle and emotionally vulnerable with her.

Each of those models that Elena and Nathan hold about Nathan is unspoken. But it informs how they interact with one another, how they view themselves, and how they carry themselves in the scenes as this plot thread is developing.

Tracking Turning Points

You can see how the problem gets complex quickly. A relationship of any kind is already built up on a shared history, both as individual people. And relationships in writing are often about how the relationship itself changes with character development.

I tend to think of this problem framed around romantic relationships. But it applies to all relationships of all kinds. Friendships, familial bonds, rivals, and even the relationship the hero has with the villain. And for each of those relationships, what I tend to try to do is record the events of note that shape the relationship or give it historical context within a topic.

Maybe, as another example, Nathan is from the United States, and Elena is from Canada. And in their history, early in their relationship, they got into a legitimately big argument over the validity and usefulness of Imperial Units of measurement compared to Metric. Hurtful things were said. At one point Elena started crying. They didn’t talk to each other for hours. And then, they moved on later.

But that moment was a sign-post in their relationship. It was their first big fight. Each of them carries forward a perspective on it. During our narrative, Nathan brings it up one night about how ridiculous it is that their first fight was over something so trivial as units of measurement. Prior to that moment, Elena viewed the fight as a stain on their relationship. But as Nathan describes how he was being weirdly stubborn, she forms a new perspective on the event. It turns from a handful of hurtful comments Nathan made towards her and her nation; to his self-deprecating awareness of how ridiculous he was being. Not only does it give Elena a new perspective on Nathan, it ends up as an amusing anecdote about how they are so aligned, that the only thing they have to fight about is how to measure temperature.

That forms the basis of a new relationship state and is worthy of recording and carrying forward into how they interact from that moment forward.

Why Revision Makes this Harder

As with many things in drafting, revising a manuscript makes the concept of relationship continuity more difficult. As the author you are privy to the most mature the relationship gets as far as you’ve drafted your manuscript. All of that context gets muddied together with history when you are revisiting and editing earlier scenes.

If we use our example of the fight between Elena and Nathan to demonstrate this. You might be operating in a framework where Elena has already reframed her perspective on the fight. But earlier in the manuscript, as you are editing, maybe that small detail hadn’t surfaced when you first drafted the scene, so not only was the fight not in context of Elena’s posture towards Nathan; neither was the later scene where Nathan was introspective and a bit self-deprecating.

It means that as you are revising dialog and character development for Elena, you need to take in the previous state you’ve developed, and not allow the later relationship continuity events to seep in.

A continuity record can also expose a change that exists more clearly in my intentions than on the page. If my notes say Elena reframes the argument, but the scene does not give her a convincing reason to do so, then the problem is not the record. The manuscript may still need the moment that earns the change and signals why that change happened to the reader.

Not Every Emotion Changes the Relationship

It’s worth taking a pause to mention that there’s an added layer of complexity that’s not readily obvious. That is that not all emotional states between your characters form new relationship states. Nathan could be annoyed that Elena left towels and clothes on their bathroom floor one morning. But that doesn’t change Nathan’s deep trust, love, or attachment to Elena. It could be the basis for a larger relationship state change (little things like that can genuinely do that). But not all emotions do that as a necessity.

I find it personally difficult to remember that, because writing from each character’s perspective and putting myself in their shoes; it can make emotions feel just as big as if they were real. But real relationships are messy and a lot of history is left on the cutting-room floor of memory for both people. In committed romantic relationships especially, the conscious decision to tie our lives to another person can frame which emotional moments become lasting anchors and which ones eventually recede into the background.

A Lightweight Way to Preserve the Arc

The key is this: As you are drafting, if you know a moment is formative to a relationship, take a moment to note it from each character’s perspective. And if, during drafting, a previous moment starts to surface as formative and state changing for a relationship; go back and document it in a few sentences.

The proactive and reactive work at writing down how your characters think within a relationship will help your memory and create a record that you can reference. It’s especially important in the writing I’ve done, when not all the details and thoughts of each character are explicitly spelled out in my writing.

How Scriptri Currently Handles This Task

Right now, Scriptri allows you to record entity-bound relationship notes between a primary character, and a related character. The practical workflow I use is to use the above framework for recording relationship notes in Scriptri. One for each character, and bound to both.

Those notes are carried forth, but there are some limits to how they work compared to say a Knowledge or Belief note. Namely that both entities must be tagged in the scene for relationship notes between those entities to show up. If one entity is missing from a scene, you can always manually add them in the In Scene tab.

It’s worth noting that, moving forward, I’ve been thinking hard about the limits of the current system and how relationships actually develop and exist. I have some restructuring and additional features planned, specifically for building out relationships on top of the notes system. So keep an eye out for that. When those features are complete, there will be a link to them in this article.

In Conclusion

Relationships are complex, messy, difficult to write well, and part of what makes being human and experiencing life together beautiful. They are simple in concept, complex in practice, and deeper than the Mariana. My work on Scriptri is partially based on the complexity inherent in all relationships and finding ways to frame writing so that we can better express their messiness and what makes them so interesting.