The Silent Funeral - A Preview
If we’re Twitter friends, you may have noticed–from early morning tweets–that I’m working on edits for a short story.
It’s not Until Durango, that one’s done… again.
This one is tentatively called “The Silent Funeral,” and it’s actually part of the novel I started working on last November.
So yes, I am finally working on my novel again.
About a month ago, I got an idea for a key scene that was completely missing from the first draft of the novel1 and I decided to try to write this scene as a standalone short story.
I do plan on submitting this story for publication as a standalone, but my primary reason for writing it was to recharge and re-engage with a world I’ve been away from for a few months.
Why am I telling you his? Because I wanted to share a preview of the story, but with a twist. last night I stumbled across a great little site called Wordle. Here’s a summary from the site:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
I just had to try this, so I copied the entire 4000 word text from the second draft of “The Silent Funeral” and let Wordle work it’s magic.
The result is below. If you want to see a bigger version, click on the image to view the original in Wordle.
Pretty sweet, huh?
So, what words on here stand out to you? How would you guess they fit into the story?
Popularity: 31% [?]
- There are several missing scenes, actually. And a few that need to go [↩]
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June 24th, 2008 at 7:36 am
This is VERY interesting! I’ll take a stab at it…The main character is Roland. Subcharacters are his Mother and Father. The Mother appears to have a positive influence on Roland since her “name” is prominent and also appears horizontally along with Roland. The way that the word Father appears (downward) indicates to me that he either fell out of the family picture or in some way diminished his place in Roland and his Mother’s life. Could it be that Roland is taking a “look back” over his life? Could it be that Roland, up until this point in his life, has kept a lot of his thoughts and feelings about his family “bottled up”? And then let’s not overlook Muriel…Her position in the wordle makes me think of her positively. Muriel is attached to the beginning of Roland’s name and is on the “Up” side so could this be a person that started Roland on the journey to look back and examine his upbringing?
How did I do? If I’m way off base I could have just given you another good storyline.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Great stuff!!! You’re right on with some things and close with others. I won’t say which is which, though.
Great comment! Glad you liked the Wordle!
July 10th, 2008 at 9:41 am
just used wordle to analyze some corporate strategy documents. pretty interesting stuff. that’s a great way to quickly pull out themes. Do you know a way to save the output to your personal drive?
July 11th, 2008 at 6:03 am
Russ, Nice. Send me the link to that, I’d like to check it out.
As for saving, it’s not that simple, actually. Because the Wordle is dynamically generated in a Java Applet, there’s no way to save the output directly. However, there are some workarounds. The easiest thing to do is take a screen shot of the page, then copy that into a paint program and crop out everything but the picture.
Let me know if you want a hand, I’d be happy to help out.
July 16th, 2008 at 7:10 am
[...] story, The SIlent Funeral, had [...]