Building Your World
This is Penpoint's worldbuilding side: everything that makes up your story other than the prose itself. Even a grounded, real-world novel lives here. Track your cast, map your places, outline your chapters, and shape your plot, then step back and see how it all connects.
New to the worldbuilding side? Start with The Worldbuilding Toolbar, which walks you through the navigation menu on the left and what each page is for. Everything below hangs off that menu.
The Things in Your Story
- Characters: Build customizable character profiles with traits, relationships, and as much or as little detail as you need.
- Items: Track weapons, artifacts, documents, and other objects that matter to your plot.
- Locations: Nest places inside places: the kingdom holds the city, which holds the tavern.
- Chapters: Organize your story structure, assign point-of-view characters, and track who appears where.
- Arcs: Shape your plot as layered story-arc curves and follow how each character's journey rises and falls.
- Notebook: Keep research, worldbuilding notes, and loose ideas in rich text, with @Mentions to link to anything.
Seeing How It All Connects
- Timeline: See when every character appears across your chapters, and log key story moments as Events tied to the cast involved.
- Relationship Map: Explore your whole character web as a visual map you can drag, zoom, and click.
- Tags Overview: Tags are labels you attach to anything. Tag related things, then view everything with that tag in one place.
Tip: None of this is required, and you don't have to fill it all in up front. Start with whoever walks onto the page in your first scene, add a place or two, and let the rest grow as your story does. The connections build as you go: @Mention a character in a location's description to link the two, assign characters to your chapters and they appear on the Timeline, and add a relationship or two to watch the Relationship Map take shape.