Words, Words, Everywhere Words

Anyone ever heard of Wordle? If you’d like to see mine, it’s right here Don’t you love it? Basically, you punch in the url to your blog, and the site gives you a word jumble, kind of like a tag cloud, based on highly used words in your blog. To get your own, go to Wordle.net

The thing that struck me with this one was the phrase (of sorts) that ran across the wordle, “really just One writers VOICE”. Well, isn’t that a pretty nifty way to describe this blog. And that led me to jump to yet another fiction writing topic – perspective.

If you take any little section of the wordle, you can find words or phrases that take you to a different place, give you the start of a new story. I did a couple different versions, and in one (which I printed and will be framing, it was so cool) The word “VOICE” is all in caps and in very large print. The word “talk” is inside the “O” and the word “love” is inside the “C”. How perfect is that?

It depends on the way you look at these things. Are you taking a small section to concentrate on? Or is it the picture as a whole? And I think it’s the same thing with any art form. Georgia O’Keefe created beautiful paintings centered on one, single poppy, in the midst of an entire field of them. She might concentrate on the light and shadows through the curve of one small section on an animal’s skull. She did other, larger picture paintings, too, but you see what I’m saying here – the end product, the message your reader or viewer takes away, is largely dependant on the perspective you’re showing, the portion of emotion or story that you’re bringing to the forefront.

So what are you concentrating on in your writing? Is it a large picture or big theme that you’re most emphatically trying to get across? Are you concentrating on the minutia of character and feel of place in order to give a very detailed picture that plays into the overall themes? Or are you leaving the smaller descriptives for the reader to fill in and concentrating instead on the motion? What’s your perspective? Oh, and what cool words and phrases pop up in your wordle?