Relationship Charts or I'm Not Very Politic

As I have been looking at my NaNoWrimo novel that I wrote last year (it's still not finished) I realized that the book is turning out to have more politics than anything else I have written before. I quickly realized as I was re-reading it that I was going to need some help keeping track of my character's political machinations. To that end I posted a request on a few of my regular writer's forums as well as on NaNoWriMo forums.

I was a bit disappointed when some of the replies were sarcastically mean. In general writer's communities can be quite helpful and so I was shocked to receive such replies. Sadly it wasn't just one either. I felt like my faith was restored in the helpfulness of one writer to another when on the NaNoWriMo forums I received a post that actually helped.

Now I was never really taught to use relationship charts for drafting novels but it can be a very useful tool. Keep in mind that the one below is only an example. I'll try to remember to take a picture of my when I'm done and upload it into another post. The link I received led me to the picture below: 

So I'm not writing about the X-men but this is a great look at how a relationship chart works. Clearly the creator of this chart picked Wolverine as his starting point, just like I would choose my central character, and connected all the people that had significance to him with different colored "threads." The different colors indicate the type of relationship that they have with each person. In the end the notation is all up to you but I thought to post this in case anyone else had the same issue. I hope it helps and keep on writing!