A Wednesday Wordle Party

There's been an illness hopping around my family, so I'm having to plan my blog posts according to an erratic schedule filled with crying children.  No easy task, I can assure you.

I know a lot of bloggers like to play around with the wonder known as Wordle.  Until this past weekend, I'd never actually tried it.  And now that I have, I must admit that I'm hooked.  I'd like to show you some of the word clouds I created using Wordle, and also to explain why I find these useful.  Maybe I'm only saying they're useful because I need to justify all the time I spent playing around with them.  Judge for yourself whether the benefits I claim to have gained from these sound legitimate or not.

This first wordle was created using my essay "Universe."  I posted this essay for the "My Teenage Life Bloghop," and I was pleasantly surprised by the positive responses I received.  To read the post containing the original essay, go HERE.  

I now present to you a visual representation of that essay.

This second wordle was made using my short story "Blood and Tears."  I particularly like the font used for this one.  It feels old and grand, and it goes well with the name Henry (which appears prominently here).  The story may be science fiction and it may take place in the future, but the struggles highlighted in this story have been around since the beginning of human existence: death, subjugation, loss, etc.  I feel that it works, even if only because it looks cool.

This wordle was composed using the revised version of "Blood and Tears," but if you're interested in looking at the story as originally posted on this blog, look HERE.

This next one was done using my flash fiction piece "Nuance."  Though I plan to revise it soon, this has been made with the original version.  To read the story, click HERE.

Some of you may ask why I made all these, and this is where I must justify my activities.  Well, aside from procrastination (which is a reason why I do a lot of things), I did it to help me visualize my stories.  Part of what I struggle with in the world of editing is that a work as a whole seems too large to tackle a lot of the time.

In making these Wordles, I dissected each story and came to see what stood out most prominently in the narrative.  When you see certain words in bold letters, you are seeing the words you used most often, and you can compare them to the rest of the words in the field in a non-linear way.  Doing these word clouds gave me a different perspective on my stories.  If a theme I hadn't really meant to use appears in these, I can consider whether to use that theme to its fullest potential, or I can elect to downplay it and focus on the intended theme in my revisions.

As a writer, I feel I need to use every tool I have at my disposal to make my stories the best they can be.

This last one, on the other hand, doesn't give me that advantage.  This is just my name, the name of my WIP Prices Paid, and the name of each story I have planned for it.  This was done mainly for fun, and in part because I wanted to see some representation of my goal.

Hey, that's still visualization!  So this last one had a purpose too!  I knew I could justify my procrastination if I put my mind to it.