Assigning Things to Scenes

Four of the chapter-page blocks let you record who and what shows up in each scene: Characters, Locations, Items, and Story Arcs. They live on individual scenes, not on the chapter as a whole, so a chapter with three scenes can have three different casts, three different settings, three different sets of objects, and three different plot beats. That's the whole point: the real detail of who appears where lives at the scene level.

All four blocks share the same shape: a list of what's already assigned, plus a way to add more. Once you've used one, you've used them all. The differences are in what each block tracks and a couple of small extras (a POV indicator on Characters, a two-step picker on Story Arcs).

To add any of these blocks to your scene layout, see Customizing Chapter Layout. This article focuses on what each block does once it's there.

The Common Pattern

Every assignment block lays out the same way. Things you've already assigned appear as a list of rows: each row showing an icon, the name, and (in Edit Mode) a couple of small action buttons on the right. To add something, click the Add button below the list. An autocomplete field appears, and as you type, it suggests matches drawn only from things you haven't already assigned to this scene.

Each row has a trash icon you can click to remove the assignment. Removing an assignment never deletes the character, location, item, or plot point itself. It only unlinks it from this particular scene. The entity stays exactly where it lived before, ready to be assigned to a different scene whenever you like.

The autocomplete is smart about duplicates. Once you've assigned something to a scene, it disappears from the suggestion list for that scene's block, so you can't accidentally add the same character (or location, or item) twice. To assign the same character, location, or item itself to a different scene, just open that other scene and use its block.

Characters

The Characters Block records who's present in a scene. Click Add Character to open the autocomplete (placeholder reads Select character...), pick a name, and they're assigned. The character's name appears in the list, along with their alias if they have one. Adding a character to a scene is also what tells the Timeline page (and other places in Penpoint that count appearances or build timelines) that they were there, so keep this honest if you want timelines and appearance counts to be useful later.

In Edit Mode, every row has an eye-shaped toggle button on the right that controls POV. When POV is off, the eye is shown with a line through it; click it to switch POV on for that character (the tooltip reads Set as POV) and the icon turns into a plain open eye. Click it again to switch POV off (Remove POV). When POV is on, a small eye icon stays visible on the row even outside of Edit Mode, so you can scan the list and see who's narrating at a glance. You can mark more than one character as POV in a single scene (useful for ensemble or split-perspective scenes), though most of the time one is plenty.

The trash icon on the right removes the character from this scene. The character themselves (their profile, traits, relationships, all of it) is untouched.

To create or edit characters themselves, see Working with Characters.

Locations

The Locations Block records where the scene takes place. Click Add Location, pick from the autocomplete (Select location...), and the location appears in the list with its custom icon: the same icon you chose when you set the location up. Most scenes have one location, but you can assign as many as you need (a character traveling between rooms, a chase across a city).

The trash icon removes the location from the scene. The location itself, with everything you've written about it, stays put on the Locations page.

To create or edit locations themselves, see Working with Locations.

Items

The Items Block records the objects that appear in a scene: a sword, a letter, a poisoned glass of port. Click Add Item, choose from the autocomplete (Select item...), and the item appears in the list. The row shows the item's name, with its archetype (its type or category, like "Weapon" or "Document") shown beside it as a smaller label, and an icon drawn from that archetype on the left. Useful for tracking which scene a story-critical object surfaces in, and for catching continuity gaps when an item reappears later.

The trash icon removes the item from this scene. The item entity itself is unaffected.

To create or edit items themselves, see Working with Items.

Story Arcs

The Story Arcs Block is a little different from the other three. You're not assigning whole arcs to a scene: you're assigning specific plot points, which are the individual plot points (the moments you've placed in each story arc) that live inside an arc (the inciting incident, the midpoint reversal, the climax). Linking a scene to a plot point is how you say "this is where that beat actually happens in the book."

Click Assign Plot Point and a two-step picker appears. First, pick the arc (Select story arc...); then pick one of that arc's plot points (Select plot point...); finally click Assign to commit. The plot point then appears in the list with the arc name beside it. Click the plot point's name in the list to jump straight to that arc on the Arcs page. The trash icon removes the link between this scene and that plot point; the arc and the plot point themselves are untouched.

For what arcs and plot points actually are, and how to build them, see Story Arcs.

Removing Without Losing