Ideas & quick notes

Ideas arrive at the worst moments: mid-sentence, mid-scene, or nowhere near your desk. The quick note card exists so writing one down costs a keystroke and does not pull you out of the page. Notes collect in an inbox you can deal with later, and anything worth keeping can become a real piece of the project.

Capturing an idea

Press Ctrl+J (⌘J on a Mac) anywhere in the app and a small card opens. Type the thought, press Enter, and it is filed. Shift + Enter gives you a new line if the idea needs more than one.

The card tells you where the note is going, because notes belong to a project rather than floating loose. If you are in a chapter when you capture, it remembers that too, so the idea keeps the context it arrived in.

Two other ways in: on a phone, the views sheet has a row for it. And when you brainstorm, each suggestion has a Save button that files it here, so a useful pitch does not evaporate when you close the panel.

The Ideas inbox

Captured notes land in the Ideas tab of the Plan view. It is a plain list, newest first, with a search box for when it gets long.

The number on the tab counts only ideas you have not dealt with yet, so it reads as a to-do rather than a total. Notes you have promoted stay in the list with a badge, but they stop counting towards it.

Promoting an idea

An idea is a scrap until it becomes something. Promote turns one into any of three things:

• A revision task, if it is something to fix or change in the draft.
• An Atlas entry, if you have just invented a character, place, or faction.
• A story beat, if it is a thing that should happen. Beats are positioned inside an arc, so you pick the arc first.

The title comes from the first line of the note, and the rest carries over as detail, which is worth knowing when you write one: lead with the thing itself and the promoted item names itself sensibly.

Archiving

Not every idea deserves to become something, and deleting them makes an inbox a place you are afraid to put things. Archive a note instead and it leaves the list without leaving the project. Show archived brings them back into view when you want to go looking.