TiddlyWiki strategies for discussing fiction?

[Soren Bjornstad]

I think I've mostly found an approach for tiddlifying notes and ideas I get out of nonfiction (basic approach: add short summary to a tiddler on the book or article, then use backlinks and occasionally forward links to connect ideas related to it), but I'm struggling with figuring out what works for literature, maybe because I just haven't done as much of it yet.

See this recent writeup, for instance, which is an awkward mix of ideas dumped into the book's tiddler and ideas placed in separate tiddlers. I could just write a linear discussion of the story, or a bunch of unrelated “paper”-like discussions, but those approaches feel like I'm not taking advantage of what TiddlyWiki has to offer.

I've just finished Lolita and have approximately 23,000 ideas rolling around in my head that I want to put somewhere, so am feeling like this is as good a time as any to start experimenting. Before I do, has anyone else used TiddlyWiki this way who might have some pointers for me so I don't start off in the entirely wrong direction?

Thanks!

[Darth Mole]

Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but it is related to books/reading: 

https://groups.google.com/g/tiddlywiki/c/CBYmeN9LsMQ

[Mat]

@Soren - what is it you want out of it? You mention that Lolita gave you a lot of ideas, so how are those ideas different from what you get out of non-fiction? Do you have a goal with your reading? Maybe to write your own book, or to extract human wisdom, or to just remember as much of a good book as possible, or to write literary critique, or... etc,etc...

<:-)

[Soren Bjornstad]

iamdar, I had not seen that yet and it's got some cool workflows in it, so thanks for pointing it out, but it's not exactly what I was asking about…I am looking more for thoughts on the structure of tiddlers, metadata, and navigation options that I'll have when I'm done writing and relating notes, rather than an effective way to go about doing the writing.

Mat,

> You mention that Lolita gave you a lot of ideas, so how are those ideas different from what you get out of non-fiction?

The ideas may be different in that there are more layers of metaphor involved? Like, a lot of the ideas are not explicitly stated (and some of my tiddlers might explicitly state transformative readings, while others might not).

Mostly, though, my sense is that a different kind of organization may be required to make optimal sense of them. In non-fiction I generally do not care where the ideas came from once I've read the book, unless perhaps I am later trying to cite them in something I write, so a quick reference to the source is sufficient, and all the interlinking and classification happens between idea tiddlers. With fiction the context and the relationships with other things that happen in the source is much more important to understanding...a whole novel can't really be deconstructed into pieces in the same way that a textbook or even a thesis-driven book can. So I feel like some kind of cross-referencing and mechanism for tying things back to the text would be valuable. I do not know how exactly that would work or what it would do, which is why I'm curious if anyone else has developed something. Not afraid of trying some things myself either. :-)

> Do you have a goal with your reading? Maybe to write your own book, or to extract human wisdom, or to just remember as much of a good book as possible, or to write literary critique, or... etc,etc...

Yes? I think that's part of the problem, haha. But it's also why I use TiddlyWiki instead of something else, because it is capable of supporting these kind of mixed uses in a way that few other tools are. My immediate goal in writing notes in TiddlyWiki is to increase my understanding of what I just read, but I hope that this understanding will stick around and could be taken in any of those directions in the future if it later makes sense.