Relationship Mapping: A Guide for Tracking the Development of Your Major Characters

Use this writing resource to help with your character development.

Hey Story Crafters,

Do you ever have trouble visualizing the relationships between your characters?

I do! While outlining can help a lot with story development, and journaling can help with character development, it can get kind of overwhelming to just have pages of text as part of my planning process. So I take a break from writing blocks of text by drawing simple diagrams, like a relationship map.

Relationship maps can help you keep track of your major characters’ development, and what their relationships are with each other. You can theoretically have many characters you’d like on a relationship map, but I recommend using it for your major characters: your main character, your antagonist, and a handful of secondary characters.

I find relationship maps are also useful guides for keeping the core personalities and main motivations of my major characters straight, in addition to keeping track of their relationships with each other. Below is an example of what a relationship map might look like for the major characters of Shrek.

Try filling out this map on your own. If you’re not sure how to start, refer to the breakdown I did of Shrek’s character last week. You can see how I filled this map out, and how to use a relationship map effectively for your own stories, when you subscribe to this newsletter and download your free copy of Relationship Mapping: A Guide for Tracking the Development of Your Major Characters.

Relationship maps can be used for works of any length, from short stories to novels. Like outlines, relationship maps aren’t required for you to start writing. But I find it helpful to have a visual of the big picture for my characters, to see how they’ll connect with each other over the course of a story, and to see how their before/after development will look like. This will give you a better idea of how to shape your story.

Choose a project you’re working on, and try mapping out your characters’ relationships with one another. Feel free to let me know how it goes! I usually doodle my relationship maps in my journal, since it’s easier to draw arrows and add more details when I’m sketching and writing out a map. If you found this free resource helpful, please share it!

Happy writing!

Leah