Character trees

I made mine in Visio, which came with my MS Office.

It's designed more for software flowcharts, so you have to monkey with it a bit to make it work.

Yep, Visio is usually for flow charts but this can be tweaked for 'family' trees. It also does floor plans, for those situations when you're trying to get a grip on spatial awareness in a room or a building. (I really enjoyed using Visio the few times I used it.)

IMO it tends to be more work than its worth. There are so many relationships and connectors that if i write out a name on one side with the group of people it belongs to i then have to draw an ugly line across the page to another character to connect them. It gets messy fast.

I opted to get a notebook and formed a table of contents on the first and second page. I numbered all the pages and formed character briefings.

My pages look like this:

Name:
Role:
Occupation/special abilities (I write fantasy):
Physical Description:
Personality Traits:
Quirks/Habits:
Background:
Motivation:
Internal Conflicts:
External Conflicts:
Relationships:
Side Notes:


This tends to give a well rounded view of all of my characters and tie them all together nicely.

I keep a simple spiral notebook and write each mc at the top of a page and then jot down the important things, who are they married to, jobs, age, kids, pets, a simple biography of sorts. I find hand balming it is quicker than using a spreadsheet etc. However.....one note is pretty fantastic too if you prefer a computer tool. You can create tabs and sub-tabs, colorize it, drop and drag etc. But if used one note I would spend more time fidgeting with all the dandy features instead of writing. So I keep it simple.

There's always paper and pencil; the virtue of paper and pencil is that it's portable and easily modified. You can take scans or pictures of it if you want to back it up.

Visio is (alas!) not part of any consumer suite of MS Office, & it's a pricey app on its own. But there are other tools that do a lot of the same types of diagrams. Lucidchart.com is web-based and free (for $$$ you get more features).