Book Scaffolding

What it is

Book Scaffolding is a planning instrument for a whole book — not a place to write prose, but a place to build the structure underneath it: the chapters and their order, the people and kinds who move through it, the themes it argues, the settings it inhabits, the words that carry weight, and the connections between all of these.

It is one self-contained page. Everything happens in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, and there is no account to create. You open it, you build, and your work is held in this browser on this device until you choose to export it.

The guiding idea is that a book is a web of relationships. A character delivers a claim; a theme manifests in a setting; a word resonates through a kind; a chapter pays off a thread seeded three chapters earlier. Book Scaffolding lets you record those relationships and then watches for the gaps — the claim with no one to carry it, the theme that never appears, the thread that is seeded but never paid off.

Getting started

There is no required order and no setup. A good first session looks like this:

Set your book's title in the field at the very top — this is the spine of everything else.
Open About and write a single sentence answering: what is this book actually about? Not the plot — the argument. You can change it endlessly; the point is to have something to test everything against.
Open Spine and lay down a few chapters in rough order. Don't agonise — you are sketching, not committing.
Open Characters and add the people you already know will be there. Give each a one-line conceit. Leave the deeper layers empty for now.
Export a backup (Menu → Export to file) so you have a .json you own.

From there, follow your curiosity. The tool rewards returning to it — each pass adds a layer, and the Workshop quietly tells you where the thin spots are.

The depth principle

The single most important thing to understand: nothing is required, everything is available. Every workspace lets you go as shallow or as deep as you like. A character can be a name and a single line, or a six-layer portrait reaching from physical surface down to the secret they sit on. A setting can be a place-name, or a fully sensory, sociologically-grounded world with its own hard rules.

You are never penalised for leaving things empty. The tool is built for the way planning actually works — uneven, returned-to, deepened in the places that matter and left sketched in the places that don't. Build the cathedral where you need a cathedral and a tent where you need a tent.

Spine — the shape of the book

The Spine is your book's backbone: chapters and the incidents within them, laid out along a horizontal canvas in reading order. This is where you see the shape of the whole thing at once.

Chapters are the large units. Drag them to reorder; the canvas reflows. Each chapter can hold incidents — the scenes or beats inside it.

The Spine offers several overlays that read structural information across the whole book at a glance, rather than chapter by chapter:

Heat overlay — shades chapters by intensity or activity, so you can see where the book runs hot and where it sags.
Rhyme arcs — draws connections between chapters that echo or mirror one another, revealing the book's internal rhymes.
POV lanes — separates chapters by point-of-view character, so you can see how perspective is distributed and whether one voice vanishes for too long.
Act dividers — marks the structural movements of the book.
Ghost mode — shows planned-but-unwritten material differently from established material.
Zoom — pull back to see the entire arc, or move in close to work on a single stretch.

Use the Spine early to sketch and late to audit. Early, it's a sketchpad for sequence. Late, the overlays turn it into a diagnostic instrument.

Characters — who and what inhabits the book

Characters is the deepest workspace, and the most flexible. Every character has a mode, chosen at the top of the editor, that determines what kind of entity it is:

Individual — a single named person. The default.
Kind — a species, people, god, force, or haunting. Dragons. The Fae. A plague.
Collective — an organisation, faction, or movement. The Imperial Court. A resistance cell. A church.

The mode relabels the editor without changing your data, so you can convert an individual into a kind and your writing is preserved — only the meaning of the fields shifts. In Individual mode you describe a Voice; in Kind mode that becomes Communication; in Collective mode, a Public voice. Surface becomes Form or Composition. Biography becomes Lifecycle or Origin. And so on.

The six depth layers. Each character can be built across six layers, which you switch on as you need them:

Surface — what's immediately visible: physical description, age, first impression, a recurring gesture.
Biography — origin, family, formative events, the shape of a life.
Psychology — the core wound, defence mechanism, attachment style, fears, desires, contradictions.
Interior — the private self: inner voice, secret beliefs, self-image, the thing they hide.
Arc — how they change across the book: starting state, catalyst, midpoint shift, ending, and what they refuse to give up.
Web — their relationships to other characters, recorded as named links.

Voice slots. The Sample / Counter-sample / Lexicon trio captures how a character sounds: a fragment of them speaking, a line they would never say, and the words they use or avoid. The counter-sample is quietly the most useful — knowing what's out of character sharpens the voice more than knowing what's in it.

Embodies — linking individuals to kinds. On an individual, the "Kind / what they are" panel lets you link them to a kind-mode character. Link Glaurung to Dragons and his editor shows the kind's inherited Form and Cognition; the kind's editor lists all its individuals. This is how you model a named member of a species without re-describing the species each time.

The sidebar shows mode badges (kind in one colour, collective in another) and can be filtered to show only people, only kinds, or only collectives.

About — what the book argues

About is where you state, and then test, what your book is actually doing beneath its plot. It holds three kinds of statement:

Claims — propositions the book makes. "Power without restraint becomes appetite." A claim is a thesis the story advances.
Lessons — what a reader takes away, which may differ from what any character learns.
Questions — what the book asks without answering. Questions need no delivery; they need only honest framing.

The crucial mechanism is delivery. A claim or lesson is empty until something in the book carries it — a character who embodies it, a theme that manifests it, an incident that demonstrates it. On each claim you record which characters, themes, incidents, or chapters deliver it, and by what relation. Characters of any mode can deliver: sometimes a kind (Dragons) carries a claim about appetite more starkly than any individual could.

The Workshop watches for claims with no delivery — a book asserting something it never dramatises — and flags them. This is the tool at its most useful: it catches the gap between what you think your book says and what it actually shows.

Themes & Plots — what recurs and what drives

Themes are the book's recurring concerns; plots are its engines of cause and effect. A theme is a proposition looking for vehicles. It stays abstract until it manifests — in a character, a setting, an incident, a chapter, or a kind.

As with claims, you record each theme's manifestations and the Workshop flags themes that never appear — a theme you believe is central but have given nowhere to live. The manifest picker shows characters by mode, so you can see whether a theme is carried by individuals, kinds, or collectives.

Plots track the threads of causation — what is set up and what pays off. The principle is the same throughout the tool: a thread seeded but never resolved is a loose end the Workshop can surface.

Setting — where it happens

Settings are the places of your book, arranged in a hierarchy (a room inside a house inside a city, each a tier). Each setting can carry:

Description — the place in prose.
Sensory palette — what it looks, sounds, smells, feels like. Child settings can inherit their parent's palette, so a room can carry the city's smell without you retyping it.
Sociology — who holds power, how people live, what the place believes about itself.
Hard rules — the laws of this place that cannot be broken, magical or mundane. These are the constraints your plot must respect.
Inhabitants — the characters, kinds, and collectives found here, linked directly. Dragons inhabit the mountain; the Court inhabits the palace.

The hierarchy and inheritance mean you build the world once and refine it where it matters, rather than repeating yourself at every scale.

Bay — the words that carry meaning

A Bay is a word or phrase that does more work in your book than its dictionary meaning — a word you are deliberately charging with significance through repetition and shifting context. "Hoard." "Clean." "Home." The Bay tab is where you track that charging.

Each Bay holds:

Canonical meaning — what you intend the word to come to mean.
Resonance chain — the sequence of moments in the book where the word recurs, each shifting or deepening its meaning. This is the word's arc, recorded in narrative order.
Carriers — the characters, kinds, or collectives that embody this resonance. The word "hoard" might be carried by Dragons as a kind and by a miser as an individual.

Bay is for writers who think about language as structure — who want the third appearance of a word to land because the first two were placed deliberately. If that's not how you work, you can ignore it entirely.

Mind-map — the web made visible

The Mind-map is a free-form canvas where any object in your book — character, kind, collective, chapter, theme, plot, setting, claim — can be placed as a node and connected to others. It is the one place you see the relationships directly rather than through any single object's editor.

Drag objects onto the canvas, draw connections between them, and the web of your book takes visible shape. Nodes are coloured by type, with kinds and collectives distinguished from individuals. Use it to think spatially: cluster what belongs together, trace a thread across the book, find the character who connects to nothing and ask why.

Notes — everything that doesn't fit yet

Notes is the holding pen for ideas that aren't yet attached to anything — a line of dialogue you overheard, an image, a "what if," a research scrap. It keeps the loose material out of your structured workspaces until it finds its home, while keeping it inside the project rather than scattered across other apps.

Reviews — working notes on your own work

Reviews is where you keep a running editorial conversation with yourself. It tracks sessions (automatically — a session starts when you first save and ends after a stretch of inactivity), comments you leave on any object, and revisits — flags to come back to something.

Comments can be left inline, attached to specific characters, claims, themes, settings, bays, and notes — look for the comment badge in those editors. A comment can express doubt, mark something to evaluate, or just record a thought. The Workshop surfaces clusters of doubt and items you've marked to revisit but haven't, so your own uncertainties don't get buried.

Export & Ingest — getting work in and out

Export produces a clean, structured Markdown document of your whole scaffold — readable, portable, and conforming to a consistent format with identity markers that allow it to be read back in. This is for taking your plan into a writing tool, sharing it, or archiving a readable snapshot.

Ingest works the other way: paste or load prose and the tool analyses it, detecting likely chapters and characters, and proposes a plan to bring them in. Crucially, ingestion is always plan-based — it shows you what it intends to add and changes nothing until you approve it. Your existing work is never silently overwritten.

Note the distinction from Menu → Export to file: that produces a .json backup — an exact, complete copy for safekeeping and restoring. The Export tab produces readable Markdown for working with elsewhere. Use the JSON for backups, the Markdown for sharing and writing.

Workshop — the tool that watches for gaps

The Workshop is what makes Book Scaffolding more than a filing system. It continuously scans everything you've built and surfaces structural gaps — never changing anything, only pointing. Among what it watches for:

Claims and lessons with nothing to deliver them.
Themes that never manifest anywhere.
Characters with no links to anything else in the book.
Kinds with no Form described, or no cognition defined; collectives with no ideology.
A named individual belonging to a hive-minded kind — a choice worth justifying.
Threads seeded but never paid off.
Clusters of your own doubt-comments, and revisits you flagged but never returned to.
Work you haven't exported in a while.

Treat the Workshop as a thoughtful reader who has the whole book in their head at once and keeps gently asking "and this — where does this go?" You are free to ignore any flag; an empty layer is often a deliberate choice. But when a flag surprises you, it has usually found something real.

How things connect

Underneath every workspace is a single web of relationships. When you say a character delivers a claim, a kind inhabits a setting, a word is carried by a collective, or two characters know each other, you are adding a link to that web. The same links appear everywhere they're relevant — in the object's own editor, in the Mind-map, in the Workshop's reckoning, in your exports.

This is why the tool is worth the effort of recording connections: each one you add makes the whole structure more visible and gives the Workshop more to reason about. A book with its relationships mapped is a book whose weak joints you can see before a reader does.

Saving & backups

Your work saves automatically into this browser, on this device. There are no accounts yet, and nothing leaves your computer. The small dot at the top shows save status — it sits quiet when idle and speaks up only if a save fails.

What can erase your work: clearing "cookies and site data" in your browser (often bundled into the default "clear browsing data" action), working in a private/incognito window, setting the browser to clear cookies on close, or privacy-cleaning tools. Clearing only your visited-pages history or cached images is harmless.

Your guarantee is the JSON backup. Menu → Export to file downloads your entire scaffold as a .json you own. Menu → Import from file… loads it back exactly as it was, on any device and into any version of the software. Export often, as you would save a document. When the software is updated, your saved work is kept — updates do not erase it — and your .json files remain valid across versions.

Themes (appearance)

The dropdown at the top changes the entire look. Slate & Royal is the default — a deep blueprint field with a fine grid and metallic titles. Others include the warm Lamplit study, the papery Foolscap, Library card, Pressed flowers, and the technical Engineer's notepad. Your choice is remembered on this browser. The opening ceremony each time you arrive is drawn in whichever theme is currently set.

Spine

Characters

About

Themes & Plots

Setting

Bay

Mind-map

Notes

Reviews

Export

Ingest

Workshop

Diagnostics