For those of you writing a novel, how do you actually keep track of everything?
Genuinely curious how other people handle this because I feel like nobody talks about the organizational side of novel writing enough.
Like the actual logistics of it. You've got character details you decided in chapter two that matter again in chapter fourteen. World-building rules you set early on that you half-remember. Research you did three months ago that's now buried somewhere. Timeline decisions that made sense when you wrote them but now you're not sure they add up.
How do you keep all of that connected to your actual draft? Do you have a system that works or are you mostly holding it together in your head and hoping for the best?
I've tried a few different things over the years. Notion, spreadsheets, index cards, a physical board on my wall at one point. Some of it helped for a while but nothing really stuck until I started keeping everything notes, research, character details, and the draft itself, together in one Skrib writing studio instead of jumping between apps.
.For me that context switching was where I was losing the most time and momentum. Not the writing itself but everything around it. Having it all in one workspace changed that more than I expected.
So what does your setup look like? What's working, what isn't, and what do you wish you'd figured out earlier?