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