Does anyone have any tips on how to organize notes for story writing?

I have a dump.txt that's almost 1000 lines long with story ideas and rules of the world sort of mingled together since the stories are where the rules are explored.

I've been writing an application that I can put in topics and tag them so I can see what I've made notes about with a quick search. It seems like a good idea, but the tags are ultimately quite subjective, as is to be expected, so I'm not terribly confident I won't forget to tag it correctly.

As I write my story, I'm thinking I should remove the story notes from the dump, so eventually I'll only have the rules of the world. And maybe I should write story notes in a dedicated story ideas dump.

It's just so much to keep track of.

This seems like a good job for an LLM.

For once.

@spongessuck I would love to, but I refuse to submit my dream to an intellectual property stealing machine.

I can run mistrial and gemma locally with below acceptable speeds, but I never get a good result. I have considered spinning up an AI server in Digital Ocean and seeing if I can get the opinion of a more advanced LLM, but I hesitate to spend the few dollars for a failed experiment.

obsidian

Idk I write my game ideas into there and research and whatever else. it's markdown files but it allows you to search and tag and link stuff

@jestdotty My local gemma3 pointed me in that direction as well so I'll probably give it a shot. It looks like basically the same thing that I had imagined, but I don't have to write it, which is always nice.

I fully agree with jestdotty here.

Obsidian seems solid to organize your work.

@cuddlyogre for Local LLMs I do recommend DeepSeek R1, at low sizes like 7B it can get good enough speed and quality in my experience. And it has a good selection of sizes that you can experiment with. I used it to help me write a couple of game design docs. It's never perfect, but you can get close by refining your initial prompt instead of chatting, that just polutes the context imo, I prefer editing and re-generating the initial prompt until I get roughly what I want and then touch it up manualy.

Still, Something like Obsidian is gonna give you the most control and you likely want to use it even if you also use an llm

Regarding speeds, if you're in normal consumer HW and need to squeeze a bit more, you can try looking at Llamafile. It's an optimized way to run a single llm from a single executable and it can give you some extra tokens/s.

That's just my 2 cents :D

I sort everything into markdown files, loosely classify it into folders, then use a script for search, it's just grep this regexp for files in dir, more or less. I handle search that way as searching for the content itself tends to be more effective.

That's pretty much it. A terminal, an editor, and some hellspawned perl script.