Matrix, Reloaded

Creating and Using a Character Matrix

We’re doing a little practical exercise today. This is because work remains bananapants and I need to phone in a Shelf Life. I wanted to phone a friend to write a Shelf Life but I don’t have any. If you would like to write a guest Shelf Life please email me or respond to this article and let me know. I can workshop a topic with you. I would love for you to do my job for me. They say when you’re good at doing your job, your reward is you get to do someone else’s job, too. Well here’s your big chance.

Anyway, today’s Shelf Life is about creating and using a character matrix—just like it says on the tin. Shelf Life has featured an article on matrices—Enter the Matrix—once before. That one is about creating a decision matrix. I really just like the word matrix. 

Let me tell you a story: I used to have this boss—my boss’s boss, actually—who headed up the department I worked in and he wasn’t especially personable so I like to say he knew one personal thing about each person in the department, which he used to make small talk. Like maybe he had a notebook somewhere with all our names and next to each name was the single thing he knew about each of us. The thing he knew about me was that I drove a Toyota Matrix. I had this car probably because I just really like the word matrix. 

The Matrix was nothing special, just a hatchback body on a Corolla chassis, but I got that car in 2007 and drove it till 2021 because I’m that “no car payment and drive it into the ground” type. So anyway anytime the boss saw me in the office he’d be like “Hey Catherine, are ya still driving that Matrix?” and I’d be like “Yup still driving the ol’ Matrix” and he’d say “Great!” and that was the extent of our interpersonal relationship. One time he sent me a link to an article he’d seen on whether Toyota was bringing the Matrix back or not (spoiler alert: They were not). I definitely thought about him on the day I finally traded in the Matrix.

If Toyota still made the Matrix, or made it again, I would absolutely buy one. That’s how much I enjoy matrices.

Today’s Shelf Life is about character matrices and will include a practical exercise on making one in Microsoft Excel. You don’t have to use Excel for your matrix but it’s one of the best tools for the job. More on that in a bit.

A character matrix is a handy tool I use when I am developing a story that has a lot of characters who all interact with each other. I don’t need a character matrix for every story. Some stories don’t have a lot of characters. Some stories have a lot of characters but they don’t all interact with each other—there are stories in which many side characters interact with the main character or characters, but don’t interact much with each other. 

Examples of stories or series with a lot of characters who all interact with each other include:

• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

• A Song of Ice and Fire by George RR Martin

• Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo

Does this only happen in high fantasy? No, but that’s where I encounter it the most. Which may be a fact of my reading/writing preferences or maybe it just happens more in high fantasy.

If you think of The Lord of the Rings, it has many main characters. There were nine guys in the Fellowship alone, who you could consider the main characters, and then there were a ton of other major characters as well, who also were all guys. There were like three women in The Lord of the Rings. Four if you count Shelob.

Anyway, they all interact with each other. It’s not a many-to-one relationship. To write these characters, you don’t just have to know how Gandalf, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas, and Gimli feel about Frodo and Frodo about them. You also have to know how Gandalf feels about Merry (annoyed), how Boromir feels about Aragorn, how Gimli feels about Legolas, how Legolas feels about Pippin, and so on. You have to know how each character relates to each other character.

Tolkien was really good at this because all these characters had different and interesting histories with each other. Boromir is the heir to the kingdom that Aragorn really should be ruling. Legolas and Gimli have historic racial animosity to overcome if they are going to work together. To Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin, Gandalf is just a cool old guy who comes to their village sometimes to bring fireworks and load up on pipeweed but to Gimli he’s the legendary wizard who whisked his dad off on the crazy Erebor quest sixty years ago before any of the hobbits were born.

When you’re managing many-to-many character relationships, it can be challenging to keep straight as you write—or to fix in your head before you begin writing—what exactly is everyone’s disposition toward everyone else. This is critical knowledge if you’re going to write characters interacting with one another.

Characters interacting with one another is so integral to storytelling that it’s awfully hard to carry off a story with only one character—which is why it is so rarely attempted. Survival fiction (the movie Cast Away, or Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell) is where you see it most. Typically, it is characters’ interactions with and reactions too one another that propel a plot forward.

A character matrix is a tool that helps you work through your understanding of each important character’s relationships to all the other important characters in your book or story. If I need one for a given story, I develop it during the planning stage and then hang onto it to refer back to while drafting though I usually don’t need to—just going through the exercise of filling in the matrix.

You can create this matrix in any type of software that lets you create and type into a grid, for instance Word using the table function or Excel. I like Excel for this and will use screenshots from that program. You can also use a piece of paper and pencil, but you may find your space for writing limited. If you create a hardcopy matrix on paper, you may wish to have a few extra sheets of paper handy to do your brainstorming and writing and then use a key (for instance numbering or lettering the squares) rather than trying to write all your notes in the small grid.

The first thing you will do is count up your major characters. You could do just your majors or you could include recurring side characters as well. It just depends on how thorough you want to be. Next, put your characters in some kind of order, for instance alphabetical by first name. Any order is fine but you need to remember it.

Second step: Create your grid. It should have an equal number of rows and columns. That number is the number of characters you will include in your matrix, plus one. For instance, if you have 10 characters to include, make a grid that is 11 rows high by 11 columns wide.

Block out cell A1, the top left square. That one won’t be needed. I also like to set the column width and row height to be the same so the cells form squares. In the screenshot included here, you can see I have also turned on cell borders to make a grid.

Add your character names in cells B through K (or however many you have) of the first row, one name per cell.

These are in order, even if the order is obvious only to me.

Next, in cells 2 through 11 (or, again, however many you have) of column A, add your character names again in the same order. 

This forms the basis of your matrix. Next, decide whether or not you want to include each character’s interaction with themself. This is optional and you may or may not feel like you need it or want to include it. If you want to skip that, go down the matrix diagonally from your blacked-out top-left square A1 to your bottom-right-most square and either black these out like A1, mark them with an X, fill them with the word “self,” or otherwise indicate that they don’t need to be filled. Diagonal middle column is optional.

Next, if you have any characters who don’t cross paths in the story, you can indicate this by blacking out their block, marking it with an X, or filling it “DNI,” which is social-media speak for “do not interact.” For instance, if Legolas never interacts with Bill the Pony in your story, you would find the block at the intersection of Bill the Pony and Legolas and at the intersection of Legolas and Bill the Pony and fill those DNI.

Final decision: Are you going to fill from top to bottom or from left to right? Each character pair has two squares in the matrix, and this is intentional. You will be writing about the interaction and interpersonal relationship from the perspective of the character in the box you start with. It doesn’t matter whether you go across or down, but you have to go one direction. These are not bidirectional boxes. So let’s say I’m going from left to right. I will start with box B1, Frodo, and go down column B. The first empty box is B3, Frodo and Sam. In this box I’m going to write all my thoughts and notes about Frodo and Sam’s relationship from Frodo’s perspective. This will probably be very different from the way I fill box C2, Sam and Frodo, which is where I’ll capture all my notes and thoughts about their relationship from Sam’s perspective. For my example, I started with column F and made some notes about all of the characters from Gandalf’s perspective.

I’ve only made a few brief notes about each character in column G. If I were doing this exercise for a real story, I would make much more detailed notes and in much greater volume. Excel is nice for this because you can make the cells as big as you want and you can fit around 33,000 characters per cell (5,000 words or so). Word is also good, for the same reason, but there is no limit to how much text you can type in a table cell (that I know of). The downside of Word is that the table function is a little clunky.

If using a pencil and paper, I would recommend filling your matrix with a legend (as below) and then writing your notes on another piece of paper so you have room for everything you want to write. 

I find this exercise especially helpful when side characters interact with one another. If I haven’t thought about what these characters may mean to each other (if anything) then I don’t know how to write that interaction. Even if two characters have never met before during their first interaction in the story, it’s helpful to think about what historical, cultural, or personal prejudices or other preconceived ideas they might have about one another. If Character A is a womanizer and Character B is a woman, for instance, that will color their first interaction. If Character A is a (male) womanizer and character B is a (lesbian) woman, that will color their interaction further. 

Maybe they’re both womanizers. See? They’re headed off to womanize together. Now they’re besties. Theydies and gentlefriends, the character matrix at work. Hope you find this helpful for any epic fantasy writing you may have on the horizon (or any other kind).

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