Wordle: An Author's Lifesaver

 

I found out about this method from another blogger that I enjoy reading. I can never remember the name of her writing blog, but her photography blog is called Lucid Dreaming and her name is Elizabeth May. I first discovered her from deviantart.com and fell in love with her photography. It was beautiful and it spoke to me. Than in her journals she mentioned that she wrote books, so I followed those posts in particular. On one of her blog entries she introduced me to THE MOST USEFUL THING A WRITER CAN HAVE. Wordle.

Wordle is a website where you can post your entire book on the text thing and it will go through it and make a word cloud. In this word cloud it depicts the words that are most often repeated in your book. I'll explain how this helps by taking apart my own word cloud.

So as you all can probably tell, the largest word in this could is "Phoebe". This makes sense because the name of my main character is Phoebe and it's written in the third person, so it should appear many times since she is doing everything. If you were writing in first person, it would probably be the word "I".

But as you look at my word cloud a bit more you'll notice words like "just, yeah, smiled, asked, replied, walked, looked, and like". Obviously when I reread my book I will need to adjust these words and use alternate ones. But just because one word is larger on the cloud than another, there is something situational about each word.

In my english class, words that most definitely should not be large on your word cloud are called "dead words" or words that are vastly overused. Examples from my cloud would be "just, yeah, and like". These are blah, filler words that most often are not needed. So these will be the ones that I most need to work on.

On the other hand "smiled, asked, replied, walked, and looked" are all common verbs I use. They make sense because my main character's personality consists of her observing things closely, smiling a lot because she is relatively happy in most situations even though horrible events in her life have taken place, and due to her observations she asks a fair amount of questions. But it doesn't hurt to go back and maybe find another word with the same meaning to replace these common verbs.

Replied and walked are another story. Those could easily be replaced by a better, more descriptive word. These are also things that I'll have to note while rereading my book.

It is nowhere near done, but progress is well. I'm roughly halfway through it now at nearly 300 pages. So I'm gathering that I'll be close to 6 or 7 hundred pages when it is in fact, completed (for the 3rd time).

Hope this was helpful to you as it has been to me.

Good luck in your writings,
Stephanie

Really? I haven't updated since January... My Bad...

I'm shocked! I used to be such an "every month" blogger, but I seem to have missed 3, or 4.... But that's not the point. I'm going to try and force myself to write blogs more often. I think documenting my process of writing my book will a) be fun for me to look back on and b) be cool for future fans to look at. So here goes nothing.

I think I'm going to start doing weekly posts like one of my favorite bloggers, Elizabeth May (thestormwatcher.blogspot.com). I will kinap her great idea for Teaser Tuesdays (or was it Thursdays) and post small snippets of my book and maybe do something like Writing Wednesdays where I talk about different tips I've learned or F* this Fridays where I blog about something that has absolutely nothing to do with writing at all.

That's all just some random ideas thrown out here.

So even though it's a wednesday, I'm going to post a piece of my book because I darn well feel like it. So here you go:

    Phoebe stopped walking when she came to a clearing. The grass was tall and gleamed silvery in the moonlight. A gentle breeze blew the blades into a dance, wrapping its wispy fingers in her hair. A wolf walked towards her, ebony in color, with cerulean blue eyes; the same wolf she’d dreamed of before.

As he walked towards her she could hear screams and the whole clearing caught fire. The wolf burst into ash and she closed her eyes. Then she smelt the smoke and the pain in her spine. Phoebe’s eyes shot open and she realized that she was back in the car. The car was engulfed in flames and she had trouble breathing. With a cough she squinted and saw her mother’s head flopped against the dashboard while her father was lying against the steering wheel. Both of them were obviously dead. Her heart jumped into her throat. Holding her breath she kicked the door open with a strength she didn’t know she’d had. She was shocked that she couldn’t feel the flames as she walked through them. Her crimson markings glowed a silvery color. She jumped out of the car and stumbled to the ground, feeling like her head was about to explode. A car was stopped not too far away and a large semi-truck was on its side, blocking both sides of the road; it too, was on fire.

Three people were running towards her, and Phoebe tried to cover her marks. One was a tall, exotic looking woman with thick, curly black hair and yellow-green eyes. The other two were built looking guys no older than nineteen, with jet black hair; one had soft, light eyes that reminded Phoebe of the wolf’s while the other in contrast had dark, navy blue eyes.

Phoebe tried to move away from them, she didn’t want them to see the glow, but the pain in her back returned and she screamed, seeming to almost shrivel on the ground.

 So there you go, an exerpt from chapter one. please don't steal it as I will sue your ass off, send a pack of werewolves after you, and pay the mafia to kill you.

Thanks,
    Stephanie

So I just imported my old version....

So I just imported the old version of this blog over to this new account so that I have all of my old entries. I haven't updated that blog in over a year, so i'm hoping I'll have better luck with this one since it's linked to my cheapchic account.

The basics about this blog are that it is everything that has to do with my manuscript-writing self. I don't know when or how often i'll update, or what it'll be about. This is basically just a whatever I want to talk about type of blog...

So I hope ya'll enjoy.

xoxo,
Stephanie