You’ve seen tag clouds (those clusters of words in some blog sidebars that show the most commonly used tags or categories). I’m not a fan of tag clouds. The bigger words always look like they’re bragging. But I am a fan of having fun. I stumbled across the Wordle website and inputted the first three chapters of the book I’m currently submitting to agents. This was the result:
I like that the Wordle is shaped like a shoe with the hero’s and heroine’s names jutting out. #1, the book is a romantic comedy/mystery and the hero, Gabe, is a newbie P.I., so the shoe form = “gumshoe.” And, #2, the jutting out of the names looks fun.
I inputted my text block into the Wordle form, then opened a new window, took a screen shot, then expanded the screen shot as wide as my monitor would allow. I then pasted the screen shot into Photoshop and created this JPG (You can choose to post your creation to a public Wordle gallery instead of going to all this trouble. But you know me. I like trouble).
Like a tag cloud, a “wordle” highlights the most commonly used words in your uploaded text. Gabe is the hero and Ursula is the heroine, so their names should show up the largest. I’m pleased that they do.
Mackie is Gabe’s uncle. He has several point-of-view scenes in the novel and plays a major role in the plot.
The Wordle website has several font and color and shape variations. Play with your own Wordle then let me know about it in the comments section. When I have a moment, I’ll pop over to your blog and check it out.