Short Fiction in the Cloud

This is a complete rip off of a recent post by Scott Westerfeld, but I decided to see what my short stories looked like in Word Cloud. Basically, you paste a piece of text (or URL, which I find doesn’t work as well) into a box and it takes the most common words and makes a beautiful cloud of words. The more you use a word, the bigger it is. I decided to take the two fiction pieces posted on my blog and try them out

Note: These are showing up super tiny for some reason, and the image edit function isn’t letting me make them bigger without sacrificing image quality. If you click on them, you can see the full size clouds.

First up, The Brightest Shade of Gray!

The story’s emphasis on family can be really be seen in this one with mother and sister being prominently featured. Arbella is the name of one of the major characters, as is the gardner. The story also takes place in a fairy-tale like forest, so the emphasis on the natural world can be felts with big words like forest, trees, and rose. I didn’t realize I used the word “something” that often though. Probably isn’t one I should be falling back on as much.

Now onto Oriana and the Magic Lines!

Can you tell that magic plays a big role in this one? Words like magic, spell, wizard, vision, magical, power and symbols (in reference to magical symbols) can be found. The central characters: Missy, Rina, and Darius are displayed in pretty large font. It’s told in first person, so Oriana’s name is much smaller. Also, the word eyes is pretty big on both clouds. I guess I depend on them a lot to show emotion. Wonder if that’s a bad thing?

That was fun!