No character goes OOC again
Structured character cards — one card holds looks, personality, relationships, and status. Even at chapter 50, you'll remember every detail from chapter 1.
Get started nowLitMemo's character management uses structured cards to gather each character's looks, personality, catchphrases, relationships, and living status onto one card — with customizable fields, pulled up in the sidebar in a second while you write. When you reach chapter 50, you no longer have to flip back through 49 chapters to confirm an eye color or a setting, and the AI can even surface contradictions. That's the biggest difference from character notes scattered across Word docs and spreadsheets.
"His eyes are clearly blue... wait, chapter 12 says green?"
As the cast of a long work grows, contradictions in looks, personality traits, and speech patterns quietly start creeping in. Running on memory, you eventually lose track of who's set up how — and sooner or later a sharp-eyed reader catches it. One comment saying 'did the author forget?' is enough to sour your whole day.
The core features of Character management tool — character profiles and relationship graphs
Custom character profile fields
Every project can define its own character profile schema: looks, personality, background, special abilities — which fields you use is entirely up to you, never locked into someone else's template. Writing wuxia? Add 'martial arts' and 'sect.' Writing sci-fi? Add 'race' and 'cybernetics.' Every field supports rich text, so a long backstory or a setting-image caption fits right in. Without a tool, these details scatter across a dozen files, and one change means syncing them everywhere; in LitMemo, one card is the single source of truth — change it once, and it updates everywhere.
- Start fast with a default template, or build from scratch
- Rich-text fields for detailed descriptions
- All projects in a series share one schema
Character status tracking
Tag a character's status — alive, dead, missing, injured — and one glance down the character list tells you who's still on stage and who's exited. The classic long-form blunder is 'forgetting a side character died long ago and bringing them back later' — and readers catch it every time. LitMemo turns status into a filterable field, and paired with drag-to-reorder and search, even 200 characters can be pinpointed in three seconds — no endless scrolling down the sidebar.
- Status tags (alive / dead / missing / other)
- Drag-to-reorder to manage character order quickly
- Filter and search to pinpoint any character
Character relationship network
Who's whose master? Who are sworn enemies? Create one relationship in LitMemo and the two-way link fills in the other side automatically — set A as B's master, and B's card automatically shows A as their apprentice, no need to maintain it twice. Relationship types are fully customizable (master-apprentice, lovers, rivals, blood kin...), and once built you can switch to a visual relationship graph with one click, laying the entire character network out on a single image. No matter how large the ensemble, who relates to whom will never contradict itself — and the moment you add a new character, their place in the whole web is instantly visible.
- Two-way links sync automatically
- Customizable relationship types (master-apprentice, lovers, rivals...)
- Share characters across works (series management)
Three genres, three real field sets
"Customizable fields" stays abstract until you see three actual cards. Wuxia (the Historical template): dynasty, social rank, and official title up top; a sect-and-master field in the backstory tab; martial arts, weapons, and inner-power cultivation under abilities. Sci-fi (the Sci-Fi template): species, faction, and military rank instead; an implants-and-augmentation field in appearance; tech gear and cybernetics under abilities. Contemporary (the Modern template): occupation, education, and residence up top, with social circle, hobbies, finances, and expertise on the last tab. Pick one of seven built-in templates to start, then add and cut fields to fit your story.
- Wuxia: dynasty, social rank, sect lineage, martial arts, inner power
- Sci-fi: species, faction, rank, implants, cybernetic augments
- Contemporary: occupation, education, social circle, finances, expertise
Five things to check before you revise
That line up top — "his eyes are clearly blue" — isn't a joke; it's a pothole every long-form writer eventually hits. Contradictions like it share one trait: they sit in passages dozens of chapters apart, resurfacing so rarely that memory is the worst possible place to keep them. Rather than getting caught after publishing, pin down the five details that drift most while the character card is still open — eye color and distinguishing features, catchphrases, the age line, how characters address each other, and living-or-dead status. Each one has a field in LitMemo, so when something feels off, running down this list beats re-reading a hundred thousand words.
- Eye color, hair color, distinguishing features — settle appearance once
- Catchphrases and speech style — don't let a character start sounding like someone else
- The age line — when time moves forward, ages move with it
- Forms of address — when a relationship shifts, what they call each other shifts too
- Living or dead — don't let an exited character stroll back on stage
Have you run into this too?
「By chapter 30, you look back and find the protagonist's eye color has changed three times」
The character card locks the looks in once, and while you write, the editor sidebar pulls it up in a second to check — no scrolling back 30 chapters. Eye color, hairstyle, height, all the easily muddled details sit on one card, so a quick glance before you write is all it takes.
「An ensemble cast of 30, and every side character's catchphrase blurs together」
Each character gets its own card, so speech style, personality, and pet phrases are managed separately — a glance before writing dialogue keeps voices from bleeding into one another. Better still, the AI can read these settings and flag 'this doesn't quite sound like something they'd say,' helping you guard each character's voice.
「The sequel needs a side character from the previous book, but you've forgotten the settings」
Attach the character at the series level to share across books, and when you open a new project for the sequel, the previous book's characters carry over automatically — full settings a click away. No digging back through the old work, and no risk of writing a character out of step with how they appeared before.
The usual way vs LitMemo
| The usual way | LitMemo | |
|---|---|---|
| How it's managed | Scattered files or spreadsheets | Structured cards + custom fields |
| Finding a character | Ctrl+F or manual filtering | Search + filter + tags, instant |
| Character relationships | Hand-drawn or memorized | Two-way relationship graph, built automatically |
| Sharing across works | Copy and paste | Series sharing + independent override |
| Consistency check | From memory | AI scans for contradictions |
Get started in four steps
- 1
Create a character card
Click New on the characters page and fill in the name and basics
- 2
Customize profile fields
Add fields like looks, personality, and abilities to suit your work
- 3
Build character relationships
Draw links between characters, and the two-way relationship generates itself
- 4
Check as you write
Pull the character card up in the editor sidebar to keep everything consistent
Frequently asked questions
There's no limit. Whether it's 10 characters or 200, each one gets its own structured profile card with custom fields for looks, personality, background, and more. When the cast grows, built-in search, filtering, and status tags let you pinpoint any character in seconds — no endless scrolling down the sidebar — so even an ensemble cast stays manageable.
Yes. Every project can define its own character profile schema, and which fields you use is entirely up to you — add sects and martial arts for wuxia, or races and cybernetics for sci-fi. Every field supports rich text, so a long backstory fits right in. Default templates get you started fast, and all projects in the same series share the same schema.
When you create a relationship between characters (such as master-apprentice, lovers, or rivals), LitMemo automatically fills in the two-way link — set A as B's master, and B's card automatically shows A as their apprentice, no need to maintain it twice. Once built, one click switches to a visual relationship graph that lays the whole network out on a single image, and relationship types are fully customizable.
Yes. With series management, multiple works in the same universe can share characters — when you write a sequel, the previous book's characters carry over automatically and their settings are a click away. Each work can also override a character's status independently (alive in this volume, dead in the next), with volumes never affecting one another, so they share the same character base while keeping their own plot differences.
@mentions update themselves. On rename, LitMemo sweeps every chapter in the project — or every project in the series, if the character lives at series level — and swaps each mention pointing at that character over to the new name. What it does not touch is the old name where you typed it into your prose: that's your manuscript, and a tool has no business rewriting it. To keep the old name recognized, add it to that character's aliases.
LitMemo has no folders. It uses three complementary approaches instead. Tags: main cast, antagonists, a particular faction — label them however you think, and search matches names, aliases, and tags together. Ordering: drag whoever the current arc needs to the top. Relations: create an organization entry in your worldbuilding and attach characters to it, then follow faction lines through the relationship graph. Characters who have exited can be deactivated.
Better together
Worldbuilding management
Places, organizations, items — worldbuilding elements that need managing just as much as characters
Learn moreSeries management
Share characters across books — no rebuilding within one universe
Learn moreAI writing assistant
The AI understands your character settings and gives consistency suggestions
Learn moreWherever the pen rests, there is home
Don't let cracks in the details
ruin your good story
Start now, and scale up as your work grows