A relationship graph is the most seductive and least useful screen in most writing tools. It looks impressive, it fills up fast, and after fifty characters it is a ball of string that tells you nothing.
It becomes useful the moment you stop looking at all of it and start asking it questions. Who has no ties to the plot? Who is tied to everything? Which family has a child with no parents? Who was an ally in act one and an enemy by act three, and does the manuscript ever show the turn? Those are the questions that find plot holes, and this guide is about asking them in Lokee's graph. The example is the demo story The Ashen Circle: a rebel network in the city of Duskhollow, the Crown Watch hunting it, and a duke whose own daughter funds the rebellion.
Make the graph small before you read it
Open Graph from the vault sidebar. Three controls cut it down to something you can read.
Show sets how many entities are drawn: 100, 300, 500 or All. The default is 300, and when there are more a note says how many of the total are shown, "most connected first". That phrase is a reading aid in itself. At 100 you are looking at the spine of your story, and if a character you consider central is missing at 100, the book may not treat them as central either.
Search entities… in the toolbar dims every node whose name does not match, so one character stands out without the rest disappearing.
Entity types shows a chip per type. Hide places and factions and you see only the human web; hide characters and you see the political map underneath it. Hiding a type also frees its slots: hide places at a limit of 100 and the next most connected non-places come in.
The fourth filter is in Relations. It lists the relationship types present in the graph; click one to hide it, or use Show all and Hide all. A count such as "(3 hidden)" reminds you that something is filtered. Hiding "knows" is usually the first thing to do. Acquaintance links are real, but they drown the ties that drive plot.
Focus on one character and their world
Click a node. The graph focuses on it: its neighbours stay bright and everything else dims. A small bar offers depth 1, 2 or 3, Collapse and Open.
- Depth 1 is the character's direct ties. For Rowan Ashe in the demo that is his sister Mira, Captain Aldric Thorne who knows him, Old Bram, Lady Iseult who allies with him, and the Ashen Circle.
- Depth 2 adds the people his people know. Mira's son Finn appears through her; Ophelia Crane appears through Iseult's rivalry. Depth 2 is where dramatic irony lives: the people who can hurt a character without ever meeting him.
- Depth 3 is usually most of a small cast. Use it to check whether two storylines connect at all.
Collapse removes out-of-depth nodes instead of dimming them, and the layout settles around what is left. Open goes to the entity's card; double-click does the same from anywhere in the graph.
Clusters show loyalties, and the nodes between them show plot
Relationship types can be marked Cluster relationship in Settings, under Relationship types on the Structure tab (it "pulls connected entities closer together in the graph layout"). In the demo, "Member Of" is a cluster type, so the Ashen Circle and the Crown Watch each gather their members. The Clusters button lists the Cluster groups it found; switch a group off to stop it pulling, which helps when one big faction squeezes everything else to the edge. Graph clustering under Graph features on the same tab turns the behaviour off for the whole vault.
The interesting nodes are the ones between two clusters: a member of one group with strong ties into another. In the demo that is Lady Iseult, a Varnhold whose ally is in the Ashen Circle. Every double agent, defector and divided loyalty in your book should look like that. If your traitor sits deep inside one cluster with nothing reaching out, the betrayal will feel unearned, because the book has given them no ties to betray towards.
Make the lines say something
In Relations, Edit on a relationship type sets its look: Edge color, Line style (Solid, Dashed, Dotted) and Power of connection. Power thickens the edge and pulls connected entities closer together in the 3D graph. A convention that works: family solid, alliances dashed, rivalries red, and the strongest bonds with high power.
The toolbar handles legibility. Nodes: and Edges: cycle label modes (always, auto, hidden). Arrows: shows direction, which matters for "parent of" and "rules". Expand relationships draws every relationship between two entities as its own line instead of one bundled line; useful when two characters are siblings, rivals and co-conspirators at once.
Layout tools are there when the picture is cramped: Physics on or off, Respawn to scatter unpinned nodes and lay them out again, Reset to clear all locks and positions, and the spread and scale sliders. Right-click a node and Lock position if you want the protagonist to stay in the middle.
2D or 3D
2D is better for reading and for small edits: drag from node to node to create a relationship, right-click for Add entity, Focus or Start relationship →, and Shift+click to select several nodes. Multi-select is 2D only; the selection bar offers Open when one node is selected and Delete for the lot, handy for clearing stray entities after an import.
3D copes better with very large vaults; above roughly a thousand entities the graph suggests it. Power of connection is most visible there, as close allies pull together in space. Press L to lock the camera while you type in search. The Android app shows the 2D graph only.
What each shape means for the story
Here is what the shapes mean for a story, and what to do about each.
Isolated nodes
An entity with no relationships at all. The Statistics page counts them as Isolated and lists them under Isolated entities: "These entities have no relationships. Consider linking them or removing them." In a local vault, the Health page also lists them under Isolated (no relationships), next to entities with no description or no attributes. The Health page is local-vaults only; the Statistics page in a cloud vault still links to it, and that link leads nowhere useful, so use the Statistics list there.
An isolated character is one of three things:
- a walk-on who does not need to be in the bible at all;
- a missing thread: you meant them to matter and the book never connected them (the most valuable kind to find);
- a modelling gap: the ties exist in your head and in the text, but not in the vault.
Places are a special case. A Place field puts people on maps, but it is not a relationship, so a tavern named only in characters' Place fields counts as isolated. In the demo, The Gilded Lantern hosts Rowan, Sera and Old Bram through Place fields and still has no relationships. That is fine; skip places when you read this list, or add a location relationship if you want them in the graph.
Over-connected hubs
A node with ties to everyone. At Show 100, hubs sit in the middle with spokes in every direction. Some are correct: a capital city, the protagonist. A minor character as a hub is a warning sign. Either they are doing too much plot work (the innkeeper who happens to know every secret), or they are a convenience you leaned on while drafting. Focus on them at depth 1 and ask, for each tie, whether the book shows it or merely needs it.
Missing family links
Family relationships are where gaps are easiest to see and most embarrassing to miss. A child with one parent, siblings whose parents are not linked, a dynasty with a generation missing. Filter Relations to the family types only and look for short chains and dangling ends. Family sagas and succession shows the family tree view, which is better for the details, but the graph shows the gaps across all families at once.
Bridges that only one scene supports
When a single tie connects two halves of your cast, the whole plot crosses that one bridge. Collapse at depth 1 on each end and check that the relationship is earned in the text, not just in the vault.
Find plot holes at a past moment
Relationships change: alliances end, people marry, rivals reconcile. If you record those as changes rather than edits (see Recording change instead of overwriting it), the graph can show any moment.
Set Viewing at the top of the page to a world point or a chapter. A bar above the graph says "Showing names and relationships at" that moment, and that you switch to Current to edit. Relationships that had not begun yet disappear; ones that had ended reappear. Names follow the moment too, so a character renamed later shows the earlier name. Three kinds of "when" explains the difference between viewing a world point (what was true in the world) and a chapter (what the reader has been told by then).
Show ended relationships keeps relationships that are over visible, so the current graph also shows broken alliances and dead marriages. For a story about loss, that view is often more honest than the clean present.
Compare… in the Viewing control shows two moments at once. The bar's legend marks relationships Only at the left side as faded and those only at the right side as glowing; type changes are listed on each relationship. Compare the start of act one with the end of act two: every faded line is a tie the story broke, every glowing line one it made. Each should correspond to a scene. If a glowing alliance has no scene where it forms, you have found a hole the reader will fall into.
The Ashen Circle, end to end
Here is a full pass on the demo cast, the way I would do it before a revision.
Shrink it. Show 100 changes nothing in a seventeen-entity vault, but hiding "Knows" in Relations does: Aldric's one line to Rowan vanishes, and the two factions separate cleanly. What is left is family, membership, one alliance and two rivalries. That is the spine.
Focus the antagonist. Click Magistrate Ophelia Crane, depth 2. Depth 1 is thin: the Crown Watch, and her rival Iseult. Depth 2 reaches Rowan through Iseult's alliance, and Captain Aldric through the Watch they both serve. Now the question for each bright node: is there a scene? Ophelia and Iseult, yes, chapter three. Ophelia and Aldric: she commands his service and he is Rowan's oldest friend, and the demo never puts them in a room. That is the missing scene where Aldric is pressed to give Rowan up. Found in ninety seconds.
Read the isolated list. Statistics shows three isolated entities: Duskhollow, Tarnside and The Watch House, all places that exist only through Location fields. Skip them. No isolated character, which in a seventeen-entity cast is expected; in a three-hundred-entity vault, this is where the forgotten cousin turns up.
Look between clusters. Iseult sits between the Varnhold family and the Ashen Circle, pulled both ways by her father's link and her alliance with Rowan. Correct: she is the divided loyalty. The Duke, by contrast, is tied to the Circle only by "Rival Of". If a later chapter has him switch sides, the graph will want a tie that makes the switch believable before it happens.
Compare two moments. The demo has no history yet, so add some: record Iseult's alliance with Rowan as beginning at a world point "After the raid", and the Duke's rivalry with the Circle as ending at "The confession". Then Compare… the opening moment with the confession. One glowing line (the alliance), one faded line (the rivalry). Two scenes the book owes the reader. If either has no chapter, that is the hole, and it is now a line on a screen rather than a feeling in a reader's chest.
Common mistakes
Reading the whole graph. Nobody can. Shrink first with Show, type chips and Relations, then focus.
Treating every isolated entity as a problem. Places, objects and walk-ons are allowed to be alone. Read the list for characters you meant to matter.
Fixing a hole in the vault instead of in the book. Adding a relationship between Ophelia and Aldric makes the graph look right. It does not write the scene. The vault should record what the pages say, not what they should say; the graph points, the manuscript answers.
Expecting the graph to show time without recorded changes. Viewing a past moment only moves the picture if relationships have a beginning or an end on record. An edit overwrites; a recorded change is what the Viewing control reads.
Mistaking a label for a hole. Graph label modes show some values in raw English rather than your vault's language, and a bundled line hides how many ties two people really share. Expand relationships before you conclude that two characters have only one connection.
What Lokee doesn't do here
The graph reads only what your vault records. It cannot tell you whether a tie has a scene behind it, whether that scene is any good, or whether a reader will feel the betrayal; it can only show that the betrayal has no ties to feed on. It does not comment: comment threads live on the manuscript, not on nodes. And its suggestions are structural, so a book whose problem is pacing or voice will look perfectly healthy here. For the contradictions a graph cannot show, such as a relationship that ends before it begins, run the consistency check.
A graph review before each draft
- Show 100, hide "knows". Is the spine the story you think you are telling?
- Open Statistics; read the isolated list, skipping places. Link, cut or note each one.
- Focus the antagonist at depth 2. Does every bright node have a scene with pressure in it?
- Look at the nodes between clusters. Are your loyalties as divided on the page as in the graph?
- Filter to family types; look for dangling ends.
- Compare the opening and the climax. Every faded or glowing line needs a scene.
Twenty minutes, and most of what it finds is cheaper to fix now than after a beta reader finds it. The graph rewards a schema built on purpose, so Setting up a story bible that scales covers relationship types in detail, and how Lokee helps with worldbuilding places the graph among the other views. You can try every step above on the demo's cast in the demo; the graph help section and the character relationship map overview give the short version.