Young Writers Society

This is a pretty simple activity - all you need to do is head to a word cloud generator (wordclouds.com is one that's free and easy to use), copy and paste some of your poetry or writing into the text box, and let the generator do the rest! You can even control the shape, colours, background, and size of the word cloud if you like.

If you don't know what a word cloud is, it's pretty much what it sounds like. A bunch of words and phrases are grouped together in a "cloud" - which can be any shape - and the words range from huge to tiny, with the bigger words showing up more frequently in the text you supplied than the smaller words. (For example, the biggest word in the word cloud I made was "like" go figure, followed by "will", "can", "watch", "option", "stars", and "eyes".) You can use as many or as few as your poems / chapters / what-have-you as you want for your word cloud, and you can post as many times as you want in this thread!

The only rule is that if you know the text you supplied has swearing in it (and therefore the resulting word cloud will probably have curse words, too), please remember to include a warning - or just edit the swearing out of the text you copy&paste into the generator.

All credit for this fun idea goes to the wonderful @IcyFlame, who suggested I make a word cloud out of all my poems and see what happened :) I thought it'd be cool to see the similarities and differences among other people's word clouds, too!

Here's the word cloud I made - I put a whopping 21 of my poems into the text box!


I also got carried away and made a bunch of variations hehe c:

Most of my poems are handwritten, so I think I only put 7 or 8 poems in this? I don't quite remember, but my biggest word is also "like" xD

I've put maybe 28 poems in here (mostly my wall poems), including one with a repeating refrain and I think it might have skewed the results a bit . try to guess the refrain

I took all my poems from 2017 to 2020 and turned it into this!

I think you can tell I like similes, haha.

I made ones for Eagle Rock and The One I Loved -- they were a lot of fun!

Ooh! This is really cool. I put my novel into it and this is what I got:



One guess what my protagonist's name is

But it was really interesting to me that eyes came up so much, I didn't realize I reference them so often, but I guess it makes sense. I do convey a lot of emotions through eyes.

Also, because I'm a nerd, I was curious to see how my novel was shifting over the chapters so I made a few ones from smaller chunks. And it's particularly striking to me to notice how the vibes change. I'll enspoiler it so it doesn't take up tooooo much space.

Whoa, these all look really cool! Where do ya'll make them?

Woah! This looks really neat.



@LordMomo use this site https://www.wordclouds.com/

Here's one for an early outline of The Blind Mule:

I've seen this thread the last few times I've checked out the forums, so I just had to try it out! The first one I wanted to do was something from a long time ago. I took the very first post I made in the first storybook I ever created - all the way back in 2016! - and checked out what were my most common words. The post involved my character being very confused, so a question mark just felt right.



The second one is a word cloud for the novel draft I completed in the very beginning of this month. I know that it realistically makes sense that character names would be some of the most used words, but I really love this word cloud because love and connections between characters is a major theme in my book.

I thought it'd be cool to try out word clouds with a couple of villanelles I've written, since there's so much repetition in the structure!

The first one is one I wrote for a poem a week prompt, in the parking lot:


The second one is something I wrote for my brother, which I called A Villainelle (if you read the words I think it's fairly apparent why haha):

(^You can even kind of figure out the rhyme scheme in this one just by looking at the word cloud!)

Did this for the thus far published parts of Miscreants~ I realised that Gerhard's name doesn't appear nearly as frequently as the other two Maybe I need more scenes with him ha . . .

Here's the 2021 NaPo thread titles in jammy colors!



Here's a word cloud of my NaPo thread in the shape of a locust <3 years lost to locusts (the words with the highest frequency were can (19), sun (15), always (12), home (12), river (12), still (12), just (10), never (10), now (10), one(10), space (10), walk (10), many (9), stars (9), wings (9)) --- definitely found it interesting that "sun" overtook "river" for frequency this year! And also found it really interesting all the "time" words like 'never / always / now / still'. The most appearing words seem very fitting.


I really want to do my previous napo threads now to compare - but I'm not sure I want to take the time to find all the text versions of the poems! Instead here's my 2018 thread "heavy dreams & lofty responsibilities" word cloud which also has a lot of "time" words!

Did another one for Miscreants today just to see if anything changed! I switched up the settings a bit to 'display more words', so it turns out the main three characters aren't appearing so unevenly anymore (that, or my conscious attempts to increase the Gerhard scenes paid off)




I think there's less theme prevalence here than in the last one, but a lot more 'scene' words like "around", "thought", "turned", "said", "hand". It gives more of the impression that this is a story where a lot of things 'happen', in my opinion.