Every writer eventually arrives at the point in their career where they think, “Wait, what am I writing about again?”
Word clouds are a highly efficient way to get a thousand-foot view on your work, and so much cheaper than bourbon-fueled deep dives into why you obsess over a massive trench war a thousand light-years away…
I used a nifty python script that lets you superimpose your clouds over images, so the words take the color of the images. You can’t really tell, but I used planets from my solar system (also your solar system).
First I had to remove the “stop words” – the frequently-occurring glue-and-filler words like “the,” “of,” and “then.” The clouds were still full of junk… so then I removed some of the invisible words that show up in narratives, like “said.”
Lines of Thunder: The First Days on the Front
The Eternal Front
What the Thunder Said
So if you take out the characters… I’m apparently writing about Haphans, Tachba, and Trenches. Now I know.