Procrastination can be pretty

Kill-Grief, Chapter 1 (Click for close-up)

Yesterday I discovered Wordle. This brilliant site lets you paste in a block of text and create a cloud that gives prominence to the most frequently used words. The genius of this as a form of procrastination is that it’s possible to convince yourself that you are actually doing something writing-related. The pics show the first chapters of Kill-Grief, (above) and Freaks (below) though I took out some character names to balance them a bit.

When editing my first book, I was aware that I kept repeating words, so I made a list of those I suspected cropped up too often. I went through the whole manuscript ticking off every occurrence, then did an on-screen find-and-destroy mission for the worst offenders. I seem to remember ‘against’ being the winner – characters were forever leaning against walls, furniture, doorframes, each other, or anything else that would save them the effort of having to stand up properly.  They were pretty lazy – I don’t know where they got that from.

Listing, however, is quite a long-winded way of finding overused words and the disadvantage is that you have to be alert to those words in the first place. It’s too easy for something benign like ‘against’ to fall below the editing radar, and who knows what more important over-usages I might have missed?

The great thing about Wordle is that it’s not like your brain so it can’t lie to you. Next time I’m in the final stages of editing a novel – which at this rate will be a couple of years from now – I’ll use it to help root out those comfortable words that I keep going back to. There are limitations – some things stick out too much to be used more than once per book, such as – I dunno – ‘susurration’. Wordle wouldn’t draw attention to anything like that, but it looks extremely useful for catching the subtler repetitions, and the images are free to use in any way. It would be cool to wallpaper a room with the Wordle-ised text of a whole novel.

For the Love of Freaks, Chapter 1 (Click for close-up)