A Book

The book framework is for a book you’re writing. To make its shape legible, this example points it at one you already know: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

The tree

DirectoryBook/
- README.md
- Directory_eidos/
  - Directoryshapes/
    frame.premise.md
    frame.reader.md
    frame.voice.md
    frame.market.md
    chapter.full.md
    chapter.sketch.md
  - Directoryroles/ framework-owner, editor, reader, collaborator
    …
  - Framework.md
  - me.md personal, gitignored
- Directoryframes/
  - index.md
  - premise.md
  - reader.md
  - voice.md
  - market.md
- Directorychapters/
  - index.md
  - Directoryprivet-drive/
    the-boy-who-lived.md
    the-vanishing-glass.md
    letters-from-no-one.md
  - Directorydiagon-alley/
    the-keeper-of-the-keys.md
    diagon-alley.md
  - Directoryhogwarts/
    the-sorting-hat.md
    the-mirror-of-erised.md
  - Directorythe-stone/
    through-the-trapdoor.md
    the-man-with-two-faces.md
- outline.md a top-level doc

The book has no official parts, so this framework invents four that match how the story actually moves. That’s a framework decision — the standard never names a grouping for you.

What it frames

Frame	What it settles
premise	What the book says, and why it has to exist
reader	Who it’s for, and what changes for them
voice	Person, tense, register, and the rules the prose keeps
market	Shelf, comparables, and how it reaches readers

voice is the one with no counterpart in a software or research framework, and it earns its place: third person limited, past tense, tight to a child’s point of view, with the reader learning the world exactly as he does. Every chapter is judged against it. A scene that steps outside his knowledge breaks the book, and voice is where that rule is written down once rather than re-argued per chapter.

What the framework declares

### chapters

The book's units, one per chapter, grouped by part.

- **Leaf:** [chapters/index.md](../chapters/index.md)
- **Flavors:**
  - [full](shapes/chapter.full.md) — the complete chapter shape (default).
  - [sketch](shapes/chapter.sketch.md) — Intent, Open Questions,
    What Happens, Out of Scope; grow into full.
- **Canvas:** card from `## Intent`
- **Parts:**
  - **privet-drive** — the ordinary world, and the letters that break it.
  - **diagon-alley** — crossing over; the world revealed.
  - **hogwarts** — school, friendship, and the first hints of the plot.
  - **the-stone** — the descent, and what waits at the bottom.

The chapter shape

## Intent → ### Assumptions → ## Open Questions → ## What Happens → ## What the Reader Leaves With → ## Out of Scope → ## Dependencies → ## Notes & Decisions.

Two sections do the work acceptance criteria do in a spec:

## What Happens is the events — the chapter’s plot, plainly.

## What the Reader Leaves With is what actually matters, and it’s the harder one. A chapter can have plenty happen and change nothing for the reader. This section is where you find that out before drafting it.

Its custom properties

Name	Type	Applies To	Meaning
`status`	Text	all	Draft / Outlined / Drafted / Revised / Final / Cut
`part`	Text	`chapters`	The grouping, matching the sub-folder
`depends_on`	List	`chapters`	Chapters a reader must have read first

Two things worth noticing. The lifecycle ends in Cut, because a chapter that gets removed is still a real thing the root should account for — it doesn’t get deleted, it gets recorded as cut. And depends_on means something different here than in software: not “needs building first” but “a reader must have read this already”, which is setup, not sequence.

A real blueprint

---
id: the-mirror-of-erised
title: The Mirror of Erised
summary: he finds a mirror that shows him his parents, and has to be told to stop looking.
part: hogwarts
status: Final
depends_on:
  - "[The Boy Who Lived](../privet-drive/the-boy-who-lived.md)"
connects_to:
  - "[Through the Trapdoor](../the-stone/through-the-trapdoor.md)"
tags: [dumbledore, parents, mirror]
---

# The Mirror of Erised

## Intent

The book has told the reader what he lost. This is the chapter that makes him
feel it, by giving him the thing and then taking it away — and it does that
without a villain, a spell, or a threat. It also plants the mechanism that
resolves the ending, which is why the object has to be introduced as an
emotional problem long before it becomes a plot device.

### Assumptions

Assuming the reader has spent enough chapters in the warmth of Hogwarts to
have half-forgotten the cupboard under the stairs. If the loss is still raw,
the mirror lands as cruelty rather than ache.

## Open Questions

- Does Dumbledore appear once here, or twice?
- How much of the mirror's rule should be stated versus shown?

## What Happens

Hiding from Filch, he stumbles into a disused classroom and finds a tall
mirror. In it he sees his dead family standing around him, alive. He returns
on successive nights, brings his friend, who sees something entirely
different, and begins to lose sleep. Dumbledore finds him there, explains
what the mirror does, tells him it will be moved, and warns him against
living inside it.

## What the Reader Leaves With

That wanting something badly enough to sit in front of it is its own danger.
The reader should close the chapter understanding the mirror's rule well
enough to feel the ending coming — without having noticed they were told.

## Out of Scope

- No explanation of where the mirror came from or who made it. The object is
  a mechanism here, not a mystery; explaining it makes it smaller.
- No confrontation. Nothing is threatened in this chapter and nothing is
  won — the whole weight is a boy sitting on the floor in the dark.

## Dependencies

The reader needs the parents established in the opening chapter, and needs to
have seen enough ordinary school life for the contrast to land.

## Notes & Decisions

Dumbledore arrives without explanation of how he knew. Decided to leave that
unexplained — the reader assumes he simply knows things, and every later
scene benefits from that assumption already being in place.

The Screenplay example

Eidos ships a second worked root close to this one — a short film, on a framework whose collections were reshaped rather than taken from a seed: examples/Screenplay/. It’s the more instructive of the two, because it’s the case none of the three seeds covers.