Thursday, June 19th, 2008 11:44 pm
I've seen these bandied about lately, and I finally caved, because they are a fascinating exercise in style analysis and... well, sheer coolness, I think.

The premise is simple: paste text into Wordle and it generates this word picture. Take a look for yourself below, or click on the wordles for a larger-sized version.


Here's the one for The Importance of Past and Future. I like the way "box" is just as prominent as "Daniel" here. :)



This one is for E is for Exchanges, and it's only fair that Daniel is slightly more prominent, since it was part of Daniel Alphabet Soup. And, of course, the "Jack!" "Daniel!" bit makes Jack's name pretty large too.



Team's Day Out. Teal'c POV and Thor for the win! Since Thor was the main prompt for this team ficathon story, I'm glad to see him in such big letters here!



I played with the color choices for 'Tween Weft and Warp for quite a while. I should have gone with the bleak version, but I settled for this one. I like Sha're and Amaunet clustered around Daniel's name.



It bothers me a little that Sam's name isn't quite as prominent as Daniel's for In Search of Possibilities. There are two Sams in the story, after all, and more than half the fic is told from her POV! On the other hand, I quite like that Daniel is swamped in a swirl of words, with Sam somehow above it all... :)



And just for the fun of it, here's the wordle for Canon vs. Fanon: The Fanonization of Saint Daniel!




Word to the wise: these things are seriously addictive. Fun, though. :)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 09:20 pm (UTC)
So. Addictive! Hahah. Good fun though. Thanks for the link! :)
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 09:28 pm (UTC)
Oh, don't say I didn't warn you! :) But have lots of fun.
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 10:24 pm (UTC)
Oh my god, that's addictive.

For the first few I did, it seemed like I barely ever used character names. Interesting. I didn't know I did that.
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 10:39 pm (UTC)
That's why I said it's an interesting exercise in style analysis. But, yes, addictive!

Aurora and I are having a redial birthday squee in chat.
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 11:46 pm (UTC)
That is so neat!
Thursday, June 19th, 2008 11:53 pm (UTC)
Oh yes, these are fun! It's kind of cool to do flash fiction too; you can still get something cool when you tell it not to leave out common words.

This one is my shortest ever Stargate story (part one of Five Times Jack O'Neill Paid Someone Off), clocking in at 9 words total :)


This is a 143-word dialog-only piece (In a Bind) riffing off of the "constant peril" icon:


All my long stories end up with character names and "said" rather prominent. But the two I liked best:

Folsom Prison Blues

(Look how big "mattress" is in that one!)

And this one, A Cracked Bell, Ringing, which was probably one of my most dialog-light pieces.

Okay, I need to stop messing with this now! I have a fic deadline tomorrow, darnit!
Friday, June 20th, 2008 01:19 pm (UTC)
Yes! What fun!
Saturday, June 21st, 2008 02:48 am (UTC)
I never thought about using it as a writing analysis, but you're right, that's fascinating. I tried it on "Warm Iron," for instance, which is a story to the prompt 'blood,' to do with Will Turner and the Flying Dutchman. Blood is all over the story, but I was trying really hard not to use the word...and I didn't. The wordle doesn't show it at all, in fact, and the largest words are 'Bootstrap' and 'Dutchman,' not 'Will' and 'blood' at all. Very gratifying.

Whereas others of them have the character names EVERYWHERE, so that's dominant, like in your 'canonization' one. (Which I love and have saved, btw) Apparently my style changes based on the fandom I'm writing. Curiouser and curiouser.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 05:09 pm (UTC)
A delightfully new way to waste lots of time! :D
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 05:10 pm (UTC)
Bwa ha ha ha! Lumpy has its moment in the spotlight!

Really, so much fun.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 05:13 pm (UTC)
It's playing with words! I mean, how much more squeeful can it get? :)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 05:58 pm (UTC)
Hm, that's a very interesting suggestion. How much does our writing change over fandoms? Or even over time? What about writing format, as in the canon vs. fanon opposed to the fanfic, or... filks? :)

I've written a few of those. ::rubs hands together evilly::

Let's see, now. Here's the Wordle for Shopping Trip, which is supposed to be a more evenly-distributed team fic but still seems to feature Daniel rather prominently (how very odd from me, hmm?):



And here's my first long LnC fanfic, from a good nine years ago. Not much difference I can see. Is that a good sign, or a bad one? ;)




Dialogue means names. But here's a fic that deliberately never mentioned any names at all:




And here's a filk! To be fair, the chorus ups the name ratio by quite a bit:



Totally. Addictive. :)