Tag Archives: Tagging

Tagging #3: My Tagging System

The following are some of the tags I’ve evolved to help me organize and retrieve my writing notes.

I rely on two sorts of tags, those relating to GTD or workflows, and those relating to story notes.

The story note tags are quite straightforward, here they are:

5alien, 5atmosphere, 5bio, 5character, 5colour, 5ek, 5place, 5plotlet, 5scene, 5structure, 5tech

In case you’re wondering, an ek is an eyeball kick:

Vivid, telling details that create a kaleidoscopic effect of swarming visual imagery against a baroquely elaborate SF background. One ideal of cyberpunk SF was to create a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Attr. Rudy Rucker)

I write SF so the alien tag should be no surprise. As my story worlds are all tagged, I can easily search for 5aliens in the 3recursion universe.

Possibly of more interest are my workflow tags.

I started out following GTD, labelling all my notes TODO NEXT or DONE. That worked out pretty well in my daily life, but not in my writing life. Over the years I’ve settled on the following

conceit -> idea -> story -> developing -> next/working -> staged -> published/used -> archived

What’s the difference between a conceit, an idea and a story?

The first two are explained in the Turkey City Lexicon. Here’s my thinking on the process by which a conceit becomes a story.

I get lots of ideas – I think most writers would say the same – however most of them are never used. Looking back through my notes I can see ideas that I’ve not had time to use, ideas that don’t go anywhere, ideas that just don’t seem that interesting now. Some ideas I don’t even remember what I was thinking when I wrote them down. But occasionally I will see an idea that joins with another idea and sparks something. When enough ideas join themselves together they become a story.

What’s the difference between next and working?

This is something I think many writers will experience. A story marked next is something that has to be done to a deadline, that’s why I’ve applied GTD to it. Something tagged as working is something that I’m ermmm… working on. I tend to work on stories over periods of months or even years so this tag indicates something I will keep coming back to. When inspiration fails, or when I’m looking for a next project, or simply because I want to move on, I bring up all the things I’m working on and decide what to concentrate on next.

When a story is completed it will be staged, ready to be submitted.  Hopefully I will someday  be able to tag it as published.

More on Tagging

Tagging #2:  Applications that use Tagging

Here are few applications where I use tagging.

Simplenote

Tagging is straightforward on Simplenote.  Add your tags on the tag bar, keep track of them using the tag dropdown.  You can edit and delete tags using the phone or desktop app.

Click on a tag to search for it, or use the following syntax in the search bar to find all notes tagged with knife

tag:knife

Find notes tagged spoon and/or knife as follows

tag:spoon tag:knife

You can use the following trick on the webapp to find all the notes which haven’t been tagged.

tag:untagged

Evernote

Evernote has a very flexible tagging system with an excellent search facility. Searching for a single tag is a matter of simply clicking on the tag.

You can do more complex tag searches by using the following syntax:

Search for headings tagged spoon and knife

tag:spoon tag:knife

Search for headings tagged spoon but not knife

tag:spoon -tag:knife

Find all untagged notes

-tag:*

Evernote also allows you to save frequently used searches.

Evernote’s search features are very powerful. Find out more by following this link.

Emacs

Emacs Org mode has a sophisticated tagging system.

Add tags to headings using

C-c C-q

You can filter tags using the built in agenda views as follows:

Search for headings tagged spoon and knife

C-c a m +spoon+knife

Search for headings tagged spoon but not knife

C-c a m +spoon-knife

Search for headings tagged spoon or knife

C-c a m spoon|knife

Find out more about Emacs on My Emacs Writing Setup

Tagspaces

Tagspaces is a completely different way of organising your resources based entirely on tagging. You can find out more here: https://www.tagspaces.org/

More on Tagging

 

 

Tagging #1

  • Are you a writer?
  • Do you keep notes? (I can’t believe there is writer who doesn’t keep notes.)
  • Do you keep your notes on a computer?
  • Do you tag your notes?

If you only answered yes to the first three questions, then I’m about to change your writing life for the better.

Tags have been around for years, they’re very simple to use, and yet few people seem to bother. I think this is mainly because many people don’t understand the power of tags.

The following series of posts attempt to explain how to use tags to organise your life. This post will give an overview of tags. The next post will give examples of applications you can use for tagging such as Evernote, Simplenote, Emacs and Tagspaces. Finally, there will be a post describing my personal tag system.

Tagging v Folders

Most people store their notes in folders. This is no surprise. When computers first rose in popularity, the folder was an easy to grasp analogy. Put all your stories in one folder, all your submission letters in another, all your personal letters in another. Folders are easy to use and easy to navigate. You want to find that fantasy story you wrote, go to the folder marked story and look in there for the fantasy folder.

There’s one problem with folders, however: a story can only be stored in one location. Suppose you have written a story that mixes fantasy and horror. Do you store it in the fantasy folder, or the horror folder? Or do you make a new folder marked fantasy horror?

Tagging solves this problem.  Rather than thinking in terms of folders, you tag your stories #fantasy, #sf, #horror. If you write a story that mixes fantasy and horror you simply use two tags: #fantasy and #horror.  When objects have more than one tag, they can appear in more than one place, a big advantage over folders.

Tagging is not difficult, people hashtag on Twitter all the time. There is, however, an understandable wariness about taking your carefully filed stories out of their folders and putting them in a big tagged pile. What if the tags were to get lost?

Well, tags don’t get lost any more than folders get mixed up. Even so, there’s nothing to stop you using both tags and folders while you get used to things.

A Simplified Tag System

It’s possible to spend more time thinking of tags to apply to a note than it takes to write the note in the first place. One way around this is to adopt a standard system (there are many of these listed on the internet). I use a 1,2,3,4 system as follows:

  1. What area of my life does the note refer to: Personal, Writing, Work, Tech ?
  2. What’s the form of the note: idea, letter, reference, blog, interview ?
  3. What project does the note relate to: novel, how writers write, 99 java problems, emacs, six tips ?
  4. What’s the note’s GTD status: TODO, NEXT, DONE, WORKING ?

To give an example, the note this blog post is based on is tagged as follows

1tech, 1writing, 2blog, 3onwriting, 3emacs, 4next

In other words, this note relates both to tech and writing, it’s for my blog, it’s to do with my onwriting and emacs projects, and it’s marked next according to GTD.

The following is the tag for a note regarding a panel I’m attending at an upcoming convention

1writing, 2panel, 3sf, 3helsinki, 4todo

You might be able to guess from the tags that the panel is regarding SF and the convention takes place in Helsinki

Note how each tag has a number at the front. Most tagging systems will filter your tags as you enter them, so when I type the number 1, only tags starting with 1 appear. Also, thinking 1,2,3,4 when I’m tagging my notes helps speed up the tagging process.

What’s the benefit of all this? This becomes apparent when you search your notes.

Suppose I want to find all the posts relating to my blog. I could search for

2blog

This would bring up all the posts regarding my writing blog, my tech blog and my personal blog.

I could refine this by searching as follows

1writing, 2blog

Now I will only see the posts relating to my writing blog. I could add a 4todo tag to see the posts I still have to write.

If I want to see the posts regarding Emacs that I’ve already published I could search as follows

2blog, 3emacs, 4published

Most tagging systems allow you to save searches. One saved search I often use is the following

1writing, 4next

In other words, the things I have to do next in my work as a writer.

Next