Words for writers

2011-03-07T23:14:07+00:00

Once upon a time, I was uploading any number of photos from my writing school days to Flickr. Now, I have a tendency toward folksonomy, and a general philosophy that it’s best to capture data at the point of entry, whether or not you are sure you’ll use it later. Thus, I had the urge to not only tag the photos with the names of the people in them, but with their affiliation: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction.

I didn’t exactly want to type open-quote fiction student close-quote a thousand times: what I wanted was a one word solution, preferably as elegant as “poet”. What I got was two words (because of course I wanted to capture the Lying or Truth-Attempting valence of the prose students as well): proser and fictionist.

These are ungainly words. They lack the suavity of “poet”, but I have a real affection for them. “Proser” is so, well, prosy. It puts one syllable in front of the other: pro-zurr. Plod plod plod, building complete sentences out of verbs and subjects. Writing until you hit the margin and then doggedly keeping going. PROSERS, baby. Grunts of the literary world. Boots in the mud. PROSERS.

As for “fictionist”, it has more pretensions, but that’s only fitting. It has narrow little i’s, peering at the world, seeing it all as fodder. It’s more ornate, more full of artifice, and that’s what fictionists are. Peddlers of artifice.

I do so love words. I love other tools too — pencils, shading sticks, even erasers, and the odd and occasionally dangerous tools with which oboe reeds are made. I love their form that follows function, the capabilities they hold. Words are the same, but even better: you don’t have to carry them or store them or buy them, just remember them, and if you lose one all you need is a few clues to find it again. As I’ve purported before, language is our birthright. The toolbox is vast and joyously expandable. And every once in a while, it’s so nice just to lay out the tools and ponder their forms, admire in each its individual gleaming.

My thesis as a cloud

2009-01-03T00:46:15+00:00

My friend Robert Peake, a thoughtful poet gifted in procrastination, recently turned in his MFA thesis and made word clouds of his critical essay and creative thesis (collection of poems, in his case), which you can see on his blog. (Clouds show each word at a size proportional to its number of uses in the text. Wordle defaults to removing dead-common words like ‘and’, and uses the 150 most used words unless you specify differently.) Of course I jumped at the chance to be the next to perform this act of procrastinatory genius, and plugged my opus into Wordle.

Here is my nearly-complete story collection/complete creative thesis, Sea Selves, in cloud form:

I really liked the random font and other options Wordle chose, and the layout that came out first try, so this is exactly what Wordle pumped out, transformed only in color. I took all these shades from photos I’ve taken of the Pacific Ocean. (Pretentious? Moi?)

Here is my critical essay, Sea Change: Visions of the Ocean, which I tweaked a little more:

If for some reason you want to look closer at either, you can click through to the Flickr page and press the ‘all sizes’ button right above the image. My word clouds look very different from Robert’s, which is to be expected. Not only is my thesis prose, but mine is themed. I hope someone with a non-themed short story thesis tries it next to compare! There are a few words I’m slightly surprised by on my thesis word cloud, others I’m glad came through so strongly, and some which were a matter of course. And it’s interesting to see the names of characters from very different stories and worlds nestle so promiscuously together.

For fun, here is a wordle of Sea Selves with 1500 words rather than 150. I think it makes clear why 150 is the default:

In short, I hope Robert has started a fashion. This was fun, and I hope to see other MFAers follow suit.

Posts tagged with "prose" - Faerye Net

Words for writers

My thesis as a cloud