It’s a neat graph model – each scene a node, dialogue a weighted edge, stakes a color code. The skeleton’s clean lines reveal the loop cycles, the tension spikes, even the silent gaps where readers should feel the missing data. It’s like debugging a script, only the code is human emotion.

I see your point – a scene that doesn’t butt the spine is a floating bone, useless. So every vertex must carry a payload: purpose, payoff, or pivot. And the weight should be subjective, the emotional load a reader feels, not a metric pulled from a spreadsheet. Tightening that means pruning any node that doesn’t advance the axis of the narrative. Think of it as a surgical removal of excess cartilage.