I'm using MS Word to keep track of my story's characters, but does anyone know of a cool (useful) program that easily organizes and categorizes characters?

Flow charts could be done with word excel or ppt. Depends on your taste they could be really helpful if you plan to put down layers of events and people intertwinding each others.

Have you tried yWriter? It's supposed to have some generally handy tools for writing novels.


http://live.gnome.org/Dia is superior for flowcharts.

I second yWriter and Dia. Most handy tools for plotting, even though I'm somewhat of a pantser hybrid. ^_^

I've tried yWriter and thought it was more meh than anything. I'll try Dia. Thanks, guys.

I would actually recomend xcell or some other spread sheet program. you can organize your characters and their information by name, eye color, hair... etc. its much better than just writting a general bio of your characters (which is how I started) because usually you just want to check the char bios for when you need to remember eye color or any other detail. you just look under the eye color collumn you made and bam, it takes seconds to find the info you were looking for.

I'll look into that as well. Thank you, sir.