Memos and tags

In PenPick, everything your story is made of goes on a memo. A character, a place, a piece of the world, an event: each is one memo.

One thing per memo

Write one thing from your story on one memo. If you can call it by one name, like Elizabeth Bennet, Longbourn, The Entail, Darcy's Letter or First Meeting at the Ball, it's one memo.

If two things got mixed into one memo, split it in two. Darcy and his estate Pemberley are two memos. On the other hand, don't split the many sides of one thing. Pemberley's grounds and the feel of the house go together in the Pemberley memo, and a character's nickname or what people call them goes in that character's body.

Name and body

Press a card and the memo panel opens. The name and the Body save as you type.

The first line of the body shows on the card. So the first line is a good place to say what it is. For “Elizabeth Bennet,” something like “Second Bennet daughter. Witty and spirited, but quick to lean on first impressions.” The rest, like her looks, her situation and how her feelings toward Darcy change, goes below it.

When an event comes up, writing what a character's words reveal is easier to read later than copying the words themselves.

• Wickham confides, “Darcy cheated me of what was mine” → He poses as wronged by Darcy to win sympathy.

Where memos live

The top box, Whole work, holds every memo in the work once. Events stay here only while they're not in any chapter's plot. Once you place an event in a plot, it moves into that chapter's box. You decide the order in Whole work. The further forward a memo is, the more weight it's taken to carry, and a chapter's related memos and the circles on event cards follow this order too.

A chapter box's Related memos holds the memos that appear in that chapter again. These are the memos that appear in the events of its plot, and the memos you dragged into that chapter and dropped. If you've written something under By chapter for a memo, its card in a chapter box shows that first line instead of the body. More on this in Chapters and plot.

Making a memo

Press Add memo in the canvas tools, or press the “Add memo” card at the end of the Whole work box. A blank memo appears and its panel opens right away, so start with the name. If you leave the name blank, the card shows “Untitled.”

Make events with Add event in the canvas tools. An event made this way isn't in any plot yet, so it appears in the Whole work box. Press “Add event” at the end of a chapter's plot and it goes straight to the end of that chapter's plot.

You can also connect the AI you already use and tell it your story, and it will sort it into memos for you. See Connect your AI.

The five built-in tags

A tag says what a memo is. PenPick has five built-in tags: Character, Place, Rule, Clue, Event. For each memo, pick the one that describes it best. The built-in tags sit in the tag row at the top of the canvas with a lock icon, and they can't be renamed or deleted.

If it acts and wants something, it's a character even if it isn't a person. In “When the Buckwheat Blooms,” the donkey that has grown old alongside Heo Saengwon for twenty years can be a character memo too.

Where things happen. The era, season and mood of a place go inside the place memo. Write the neat, dignified house and grounds into the Pemberley memo, and it shows that this is the stage where Darcy's true character comes out.

Rules, institutions or customs that hold in this world. You only need to write what differs from the real world. In Pride and Prejudice, that's the entail: the Bennets have no son, so after their father dies the estate passes to Collins. That's why a good marriage is a matter of survival for the daughters.

Something that means one thing when it first appears and something else when it comes back. “Wickham's False Story” is believed as true at first, but after Darcy's letter it turns out to be a lie.

A clue card gets a strip of masking tape once it appears in one event. When it appears again in a second event, the tape comes off and only a mark is left. A clue with tape on it is foreshadowing that hasn't paid off yet. How to connect clues to events is in Relationships.

Something that happens. A memo with the Event tag becomes an event card, and you can put it in order in a chapter's plot. On the first line of an event's body, write what the event changes. How to place events in a plot, and what an event outside every plot means, are covered in Chapters and plot.

The Event tag doesn't go together with the other built-in tags. Darcy's proposal isn't written into the Darcy memo. Make it a separate event memo, “The Proposal at Rosings,” and connect Darcy to that event.

When none of the five fit

If none of the five fit, it's fine to leave a memo without a built-in tag. Things the five don't cover, like a group or an organization, can be gathered under a tag you make.

Your own tags

Besides the built-in tags, you can make tags of your own. Use them to group several memos and look at them together, like a subplot, a family or the protagonists. In the example canvas, Elizabeth and Darcy carry the #Protagonist tag.

Press Add tag in the canvas tools and the “New tag” window opens. A tag name is one word with no spaces. If you type a name with spaces, it's made with the spaces removed, and you can't make a tag with a name that already exists. PenPick gives it the next of five colors. A new tag appears at the end of the tag row with a # in front.

Press a tag in the tag row and its panel opens on the right. For your own tags, you can rename it there, change its color to one of the five or any other with the color picker at the end, and delete it with the trash button. A deleted tag comes back with Undo. A default tag's panel tells you what that tag is for.

Adding and removing tags

Drag a tag from the tag row onto a card and drop it, and the tag is added to that memo. It works the same for built-in tags and your own.

To remove one, press the card to open its panel and press the × next to the tag at the top. You can also press the × next to a memo under “Memos with this tag” in the tag's panel. That's handy when taking one tag off several memos.

This is how a card shows its tags. Character, Place, Rule and Clue show as a small colored dot before the name, Event shows as “@event,” and your own tags show as “#name.”

The Event tag changes what existing links mean, so it comes with conditions. An event that's in a plot or has links can't lose the Event tag. A memo that has links, was put straight into a chapter, or has something written under By chapter can't get it. When that happens PenPick tells you why. Sort out the links and chapter placements first, then try again.

Picking out by tag

Press a tag in the tag row and only the memos with that tag light up while the rest fade. The tag's panel opens on the right at the same time. Press “Character” and the cast is there at a glance. Press #Protagonist and only Elizabeth and Darcy are left.

Press the same tag again to go back. Pressing an empty spot on the canvas or Esc works too.

Deleting and undoing

Press the trash button (Delete) at the top of the memo panel and the memo is deleted right away. It doesn't ask first, so be careful. Deleting a memo also removes its links, its By chapter entries and its place in any plot.

If you deleted it by mistake, press Undo in the canvas tools. Ctrl+Z (Cmd+Z on a Mac) does the same. The memo comes back, along with the links, By chapter entries and plot place that went with it. If you separately deleted the other memo or the chapter in the meantime, that part doesn't come back.

A few things to know about undo.

• You can only undo what you did on the canvas you have open now. Refresh or move to another work and the history is cleared.
• It only undoes what you did yourself on the canvas. Changes made by an AI you connected can't be undone this way.
• Typing in the name or body isn't part of undo. While you're writing, press Ctrl+Z inside that field to undo there.

Writing good memos

One memo for one thing

A character who appears in many chapters still has one memo. Elizabeth's situation and feelings, which change from chapter to chapter, don't need new memos. Write them under By chapter. See Chapters and plot.

Don't make memos for things that aren't in the work

Memos are for what's in the story. A summary of a conversation, a to-do, where the work is headed, or a list gathering many things together isn't a memo. Things that cover the whole work, like a one-line pitch, theme, tone, era or default point of view, go in About the work, in the work's settings. See Works.

Leave it blank

Don't force what isn't decided yet. Leave it blank. You don't need to write “(TBD)” or “(draft)”: a blank field already means it's still open. Write it in once you've decided.

Choosing what to connect

Everything in a story is tangled up somehow, so connecting it all ends up showing nothing. Don't connect a background that touches many things. “Marriage by Rank and Fortune” affects almost every character, but it isn't connected to anyone. Things like who lives where go in that memo's body. What to connect is covered in detail in Relationships.

Read next

• Relationships: Connecting memos to memos and memos to events, and naming relationships
• Chapters and plot: Putting events in order in chapters, and writing By chapter entries
• Using the canvas: Drag and drop, pressing cards, using it on a phone