Getting Started with Penpoint

Welcome to Penpoint, where your manuscript and your worldbuilding live side by side. Write your prose, track your characters, map your relationships, and organize your entire story in one app. Your book stays on your own computer, with optional encrypted backup and multi-computer writing through Penpoint Cloud. This page is your starting point: follow the path below, or jump straight to whatever you're curious about.

Your Path from Here

New to Penpoint? These six steps take you from an empty screen to a book you're actively writing. Each links to a full guide.

1. Creating Your First Book: Make your first book and pick a template that fits your genre. This is step one.
2. Building Your World: Meet the worldbuilding side: characters, locations, items, chapters, arcs, and the views that tie them together.
3. Characters: Add your cast, then your Locations and Items. Add as much or as little detail as you like.
4. Manuscript Mode: Switch to the writing side (the pen icon at the top) and write your first scene.
5. Searching & Connecting: Link things together with @Mentions, jump anywhere with Search, and add new entries on the fly.
6. Import & Export: Bring in an existing manuscript, or send your finished work out to Word, PDF, EPUB, and more.

Two more worth knowing early: Understanding Book Template Types explains what each starting template comes stocked with, and Managing Your Books covers renaming, duplicating, backing up, and organizing your books once you have a few.

Two Modes, One Story

Penpoint has two main modes. Manuscript Mode is your writing environment: a distraction-free editor with scenes, chapters, a sidebar that shows all your chapters and scenes so you can jump between them, and Flowstate (a timed writing mode). Worldbuilding Mode is your planning and organizing space, where you build out characters, locations, items, arcs, and everything else that makes up your story.

Both modes share the same data. Chapters you create in worldbuilding appear in Manuscript Mode, and prose you write in your manuscript is reflected back in your chapter data. Any changes you make in one mode show up in the other automatically.

Building Your World

The navigation menu on the left is your worldbuilding home. The Worldbuilding Toolbar explains each page; Building Your World is the full section. In short, you can track your Characters, Locations, and Items, structure your Chapters, shape your plot with Arcs, and keep loose research in the Notebook.

You'll also find tools for seeing the bigger picture:

• Relationship Map: See your entire character web as a visual map you can drag, zoom, and click.
• Timeline: See when every character appears across your chapters, and track key story moments as Events that link to their whole cast.
• Tags Overview: Tag related things, then view everything with that tag in one place.

Writing Your Prose

Manuscript Mode gives you a full-featured editor built for long-form writing. Organize your prose into scenes and chapters, navigate with the chapter and scene sidebar, and save versions of your work you can return to later.

• Flowstate: A timed writing mode that locks completed sentences behind you, breaking the urge to endlessly revise. When the session ends, you can edit everything normally.
• Minipen: A slim sidebar that brings your worldbuilding into Manuscript Mode, so your characters and notes stay a glance away while you write.
• Chapter Scanner: Scan your prose and automatically detect the characters, locations, and items mentioned in each chapter.
• Import: Bring an existing manuscript from .docx, .epub, .rtf, .md, or .txt. Penpoint detects chapter boundaries automatically.

Searching & Connecting

As your book grows, Searching & Connecting keeps it navigable. Press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac) to open Search from anywhere, type @ to drop an @Mentions link to any character, place, or note, and use the Quick Add Menu to create new entries without leaving what you're doing.

Writing a Series

Planning more than one book? A Writing a Series lets several volumes share one cast and one world, while still tracking which characters and events belong to which book. You can start with a single book and convert it to a series later, and nothing is deleted when you do.

Your Data, Your Control

Everything you write is stored on your own computer, in a file you can copy, move, and keep. Penpoint autosaves every change automatically and picks up exactly where you left off when you reopen the app. Penpoint is a one-time purchase, it works completely offline, and no part of your book depends on an account or an internet connection.

• Backup & Restore: Create full book backups and restore them anytime.
• Import & Export: Bring work in from other formats, or send your data out to Markdown, Word, PDF, and more.
• Settings: Customize themes, fonts, and how Penpoint looks and feels.

Penpoint Cloud

A file on one computer has one weakness: it lives on one computer. Hard drives fail, laptops get stolen, and coffee finds keyboards. Penpoint Cloud is the optional answer to that, and it is built into the app rather than bolted on.

• Your book survives the computer: every book and every saved version is backed up as you write. Sign in on a different machine and your work comes back.
• Write in more than one place: a book stays in step across the computers you sign in on, so the draft on your desk and the draft on your couch are the same draft.
• Nobody can read it but you: your books are encrypted on your computer with a password only you hold, before anything leaves. Penpoint stores your books and cannot open them.
• Unlimited version history: go back to any earlier draft, not just the last few.

Penpoint Cloud comes in two sizes, and you can write for years without it: nothing in this guide requires a subscription. Penpoint Cloud covers what each plan includes, how the encryption works, and how to set it up.