Relationship Map: Draw Your Characters' Connections

This article shows you how to use the Relationship Map to draw every character, faction, and the connections between them into one clear visual — wired straight to your character files.

What problem it solves

Once you have more than a handful of characters, your head can't hold it all. Who mentored whom, who carries an old grudge against whom, which people are secretly on the same side — that information lives scattered across individual character files, and the web between them has nowhere to live except your memory.

The Relationship Map draws that web. Each character is a node, each relationship is a connecting line, and people on the same side get circled into a group. Mid-revision and can't remember exactly what Pei Zhao has against Shen Yan? One glance at the map and you've got it.

A relationship map is its own file (the .map extension). You can draw one big map for the whole book, or a separate one for a single subplot or a single family. It's available on every plan.

Create your first relationship map

In the file tree, right-click on empty space (or on any folder). The first level of that menu holds only four things — manuscripts, scripts, references and folders — and relationship maps sit under More. Open it and New Relationship Map is the first item. Slima creates a new .map file and opens a blank canvas right away.

Right-click in the file tree

First level

• New Manuscript
• New Script
• New Reference
• New Folder
• More — closed until you press it

More, opened

• New Relationship Map — first item
• New Map
• New Timeline
• New beat board
• Upload File

More opens in place rather than flying out sideways, so the same two taps work on a phone, where this menu is a bottom sheet.

The canvas has a toolbar. A vertical rail floats at the middle of its left edge: pan canvas, select, text box, then zoom in / current level / zoom out / zoom to fit, then undo and redo. A second cluster sits in the top-right corner holding the export menu. On a phone the rail gains one more button at the top, ＋, because touch has no right-click.

Beyond the toolbar, right-click, drag and double-click each carry their own set of actions: adding things is almost always right-click, restyling is double-click, and drawing a connection is a drag. Here's how to unlock them one by one.

The whiteboard side of the canvas — marquee selection, alignment guides, undo/redo, copy and paste, phone gestures — is covered separately in The Relationship Map Is Also a Whiteboard.

Three ways to add character nodes (however you like to organize)

Everyone organizes characters differently: some keep every character in one file, some give each character their own file, others sort characters into folders by faction. The Relationship Map supports all three.

Option 1 — Add manually (works before you've written any character files)
Right-click empty canvas and the menu offers five items: Add Node, Add Card, Add Text, Add Group and Export as Image. Pick Add Node and a new node appears, ready for you to type its name. Great for the brainstorming stage when the character files don't exist yet. (Cards and text boxes are whiteboard elements — see the article above.)

Option 2 — Drag one character file in (one file per character)
Drag a character file straight from the file tree onto the canvas. Slima creates a node and names it after the file — and that matching name is itself what links the node to the file.

Option 3 — Drag a whole folder in (you sort characters into folders)
If your character files live in folders (say a "You'an Scriptorium" folder), drag the entire folder onto the canvas. Slima creates a group named after the folder and turns every character file inside it into a node, neatly arranged within that group. Done in one move.

Tip: you can also select several character files at once and drag them in together — they'll arrange into a tidy grid.

Connections: spell out how characters relate

Nodes in place — now connect them. There are two ways:

Pull a line from the anchor. Hover over a node and a small dot appears at its bottom edge (the connection anchor). Press on that dot and drag to another node, then release — a connection is born.

Drop a file straight onto a node. Drag Gu Sui's file from the file tree onto Shen Yan's node on the canvas. Slima creates Gu Sui's node and automatically draws a line to Shen Yan. Handy when you're building relationships as you read through character files.

Label what the line means

Double-click any connection to open the relationship editor. The clever part: it writes the relationship as a full sentence for you to fill in:

Gu Sui is Shen Yan's "____"

Click the blank and type the relationship — "mentor," "rival," "ally." Now every line reads as a meaning, not just an unexplained stroke.

In the same panel you can also:

• Change color to distinguish relationship types (e.g. red for hostility, blue for alliance).
• Change thickness — thin / medium / thick — to signal how strong or important a tie is.
• ↔ Swap direction to flip "A is B's" into "B is A's."
• ➕ Add reverse to create a second line in the opposite direction. Now one pair of characters can carry two independent lines describing each viewpoint — e.g. "Gu Sui is Shen Yan's 'mentor'" while "Shen Yan is Gu Sui's 'only heir.'" Both angles, clearly stated.

Groups: circle characters into factions

When your characters split into factions, families, or sides, use a group to circle them together so the boundaries are obvious at a glance. That's how the Ink Tide map divides into the You'an Scriptorium, the Word Bureau, the Hanlin Academy and the Tide Gang.

Four ways to create a group:

1. Right-click empty space → Add Group for an empty box, then drag nodes in.
2. Right-click a node → Create Group to start a group around that character.
3. Switch to the Select tool (or press V) and drag a box across the nodes you want (hold Shift to add to what's already selected), then right-click → Create Group from Selection, or just press Ctrl+G. With only one node caught, Slima tells you to select more first.
4. As above — drag a whole folder onto the canvas to spawn a group instantly.

Add a character to a group: grab a node and drag it inside a group's box. As the node enters the group's area, the box turns green to tell you "drop here and it joins." Release, and that character now belongs to the group — moving the group later carries it along.

Remove a character from a group: hover over a node inside a group and a red × appears at its top-right corner. Click it, and that character leaves the group and moves outside the box.

Other group actions:

• Double-click a group to open a small panel for its name and colour; click the name on the panel to turn it into a field, Enter to confirm, Esc to cancel. The background fills with a soft tint of the same hue so factions read instantly.
• Groups can nest — put one group inside another (the Word Bureau split into two camps, say).
• A group's box is computed from where its members are, so it resizes itself to contain them all; you never drag the box edges by hand.
• Deleting a group asks whether to Delete Group Only (keep the characters and connections) or Delete All (remove the characters and lines too).

Use size and color to show hierarchy

Double-click any node to open the node editor, where you can set:

• Size: small / medium / large. Large for Shen Yan, medium for Gu Sui and Lin Yanzhou, small for A-Tang — size itself becomes a visual hierarchy that makes the main players pop.
• Color: pick a border color from a nine-swatch palette; the fill auto-applies a lighter version.

The palette is deliberately limited to nine colors rather than infinite — the point is fast categorization, not falling down a color-picker rabbit hole.

A node's name is the link

There's nothing to configure — the link is the name. Any text on the canvas (a node's name, a card, a text box) that matches the name of a file in your book is a link to that file. A node reading "Shen Yan" with a Characters/Shen Yan.md in the tree points at that draft.

• Ctrl/⌘-click the node to open the file.
• Right-clicking the node also offers Open File.
• Rename the node to something else and the link is gone; rename it back and it returns. Two sides of one fact — there's nothing separate to "unlink."

When you drag a file onto the canvas the node is named after the file anyway, so the link just happens. That's what makes the map more than a picture — it's a doorway into the character content.

Move, zoom, and tidy your canvas

• Move a character: drag the node.
• Move many at once: switch to the Select tool (V) and drag a box across the nodes you want, holding Shift to add to the selection. Then drag any node in the set and they all move together, keeping their spacing.
• Pan the whole map: press and drag on empty space; middle-click drag and Space+drag do the same.
• Zoom: the mouse wheel, or the toolbar's zoom in / out, from 25% up to 200%. Click the level in the middle to reset to 100%, and Zoom to fit to pull the whole map back into the window.
• Move a whole faction: drag the group's box and the group plus all its characters move together.

Your zoom level and position are saved with the file, so it reopens exactly where you left off.

Export: PNG, SVG, source

The download icon in the canvas's top-right corner opens a menu with three formats:

• Export PNG — a raster image at double resolution, for a deck or a query letter.
• Export SVG (vector) — sharp at any size, and editable in a drawing app.
• Export .map source — the map itself; drag it back into Slima and it opens.

The export always covers the whole map, not the part you happen to be looking at. Phones have no corner cluster: long-press the canvas (or press ＋ on the rail) → Export as Image for a PNG. On desktop that item is on the canvas right-click menu too.

The full story, including what a reader sees on a public link, is in Export and Share a Relationship Map.

AI and comments

AI can edit this map. .map is one of the file types Slima lets the AI edit field by field: twelve map_* operations add, update, move and remove nodes, edges and groups. The summary the AI reads carries each node's coordinates, so it can say "put it to the right of Shen Yan" — but position is content, not layout: moving a node is its own separate change, and a group's box is always computed from its members, so the AI can't hand you box coordinates. Every change arrives for you to accept or skip, and until you do, the map hasn't changed. See Reviewing AI edits.

Comments can anchor to something on the map. Right-click a node, an edge or a group → Add Comment, and the comment attaches to that object with a small badge beside it. That's different from a comment on the whole file: this one means this person or this relationship.

A few notes for writers

• The map never edits your manuscript or character files. It draws the arrangement you made yourself, and the AI's edits stay inside the map too — nothing writes back into a character file.
• A .map doesn't count toward your manuscript word count. However many nodes you add, your word goal stays honest.
• You don't have to draw it complete on day one. Connect the main few characters and core ties first, then grow it as the story grows.
• One book can hold many maps. Rather than cramming everything into one, draw separate maps for separate subplots or periods — it's clearer that way.
• If the file's contents can't be read, Slima says so and refuses to overwrite it — you can restore from version history.

Related

• Guide: The Relationship Map Is Also a Whiteboard — selection, alignment guides, undo, text and cards, phones.
• Guide: Export and Share a Relationship Map — PNG, SVG, source file, and what a reader sees.
• Guide: Linked elements — Slima auto-detects characters and elements as you write, complementing the map you draw by hand.
• Guide: File tree overview — the map is created from the file tree, and that's where you drag character files in from.