Hierarchy & glossary
Keel's structure mirrors how planned novels are actually written, not an invented scheme: rough shape far from the pen, full detail only where you are about to write. Six levels, and four of them carry almost nothing.
The recommended shape of a novel
| ~3 arcs | per volume |
| 3–5 movements | per arc |
| 3–5 beats | per movement (~2,400 words each ≈ 9 printed pages) |
| 1–3 leaves | per beat (~800–1,200 words each — the drafting unit) |
| ~300 words | per printed page (B-format, 62 characters × 34 lines) |
| ~150,000 words | a full volume ≈ 500 pages ≈ 60 beats |
Glossary — the modules
Keel — three things at once: the product, the one binary you run, and the narrative spine itself (Arc → Movement → Beat). The keel of a ship is laid first; everything else attaches to it.
The Yard — the web admin (this site): logins, projects, published book previews, these docs. A shipyard is where ships are built and serviced; the Yard holds the objects, never the reasoning.
Loft — the world bible: characters, locations, factions, lore, and the world calendar. In shipbuilding, the loft is where full-size drawings are laid out before any wood is cut.
Frames — the join between the story you build and the book the reader holds: beats allocated into chapters with page budgets. The ribs on the keel.
Planking — the prose layer as a whole; its unit is the leaf. The hull boards fastened over the frames.
Leaf — where writing happens: ~1,000 words of prose, one sentence per line, hanging from a beat. Checked out, proofread, canonized. Also the bookbinding word for a sheet of a book — the leaves of the keel are the leaves of the book.
Plank — the markup language leaves are written in:
@quote … @end quote, @think{...} style directives
plus ordinary markdown emphasis. Structural markup is emitted from the
spine, never typed.
Ledger — the return loop: facts extracted from canon prose (with story-time validity and reveal positions), promises with due-bys, and quote-anchored references. What later scenes must not contradict.
Davy — the AI writing partner behind ^g: drafts against the beat's contract with a fully inspectable context; nothing lands without your accept.
Worldline — view 7: every leaf as a mark on a horizontal line, in reading order or laid across the five story eras.
the Helm — the hand-built editor widget: soft wrap at the printed measure, typewriter scrolling, vim-lite keys, decoration spans.
The C — the shell layout: head strip, left rail, foot strip wrapped around the content pane.
Lenses vs views — a view (keys 1–7) fills the center pane; a lens (Tab) picks what the narrow rail glances at. Views hold detail, lenses hold orientation.
The resolution ladder — every spine node climbs
◌ stub → ◌ sketched → ○ specified → ◐ pending → ● canon. A stub
is a titled slot; specified means the contract is complete.
The write gate — no leaf may exist outside a beat that is specified or better, and a leaf can never be more canonized than its beat. Orphan prose is unrepresentable, not merely discouraged.
The frontier — the last specified beat in the book. Writing into the final specified movement gets a ⚠ warning — never a block — because Davy writes best when it can see the next beat.
Amendment — changing a canon beat is a migration: Keel computes the blast radius (⛔ broken contracts, ⚠ affected references), collects the fixes into a changeset, and lands them atomically.
Snapshot — a named pin of every object's revision
(keel snapshot draft-one) to diff against later.
Next
See it all in motion: the Salt Ledger walkthrough, or go deep on the spine handbook.