Kitana the Universe Collision Specialist (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kitana) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
copper_street2010-01-14 10:22 pm
kitana) wrote in copper_street2010-01-14 10:22 pm
Cheap Padding Techniques: Easy Tricks For Getting Your Word Count Up When You’re Feeling Down
From the “No Plot? No problem! A Low-Stress, High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days!” book by Chris Baty:
There will be times in your writing journey when you want to crawl under the nearest boulder, curl up, and die. These moments will pass, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and there are a host of word-count-increasing tricks that well-seasoned month-long novelists use to help pad their novels (and warm their spirits) in these dark hours.
Here are some of the old stand-bys:
• The stutter: Afflict one of your characters with a stutter, and it doubles the girth of their dialogue, and it also allows the supporting cast to spend several pages wondering in great word-count bolstering detail about the sudden, mysterious onset of the speech impediment.
• Temporary deafness: Everything from loud rock concerts to small deposits of earwax can temporarily render your character deaf, necessitating that everything be said to him or her be repeated. And repeated. And repeated.
• The dream sequence: Our dreams might as well come with a sign that says, “Free words: Help yourself.” The dream sequence (and its cousin, the hallucination) go on for as long as you like and don’t have to make any sense whatsoever. It’s the mother lode!
• The citation: If your character can read, you can cite. Give your protagonist a copy of Beowulf and an annoying habit of reading poetry out loud on their long commute to work, and you’ve suddenly added thousands of words to your count. This also works with songs, newspaper articles, and – gulp – other novels.
• The extended name: Okay, say your protagonist is named Jane. Every occurrence of Jane’s name only nets you a single tick on the word counter. Now let’s say you use the find-and-replace function on your word processor to change “Jane” to “Jane Marie”. Presto! You’ve double your investment. This works especially well in fantasy novels, where a low-yield name like Hrudon can, with a single find-and-replace search, become “Hrudon, Son of Sankar, Prince and Overlord of Outer Cthandon.”
• De-hyphenated: Word-processing programs tend to count hyphenated words as a single unit. “Lilly-livered” is just one word; “not-quite-as-potent-as-promised fungicide” counts as only two words. Deleting your hyphens may lose you grammar points, but it will definitely gain you words when you are too tired to write anymore.
I say to myself: who better to tell me about word count than the creator of NaNoWriMo? XD
There will be times in your writing journey when you want to crawl under the nearest boulder, curl up, and die. These moments will pass, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and there are a host of word-count-increasing tricks that well-seasoned month-long novelists use to help pad their novels (and warm their spirits) in these dark hours.
Here are some of the old stand-bys:
• The stutter: Afflict one of your characters with a stutter, and it doubles the girth of their dialogue, and it also allows the supporting cast to spend several pages wondering in great word-count bolstering detail about the sudden, mysterious onset of the speech impediment.
• Temporary deafness: Everything from loud rock concerts to small deposits of earwax can temporarily render your character deaf, necessitating that everything be said to him or her be repeated. And repeated. And repeated.
• The dream sequence: Our dreams might as well come with a sign that says, “Free words: Help yourself.” The dream sequence (and its cousin, the hallucination) go on for as long as you like and don’t have to make any sense whatsoever. It’s the mother lode!
• The citation: If your character can read, you can cite. Give your protagonist a copy of Beowulf and an annoying habit of reading poetry out loud on their long commute to work, and you’ve suddenly added thousands of words to your count. This also works with songs, newspaper articles, and – gulp – other novels.
• The extended name: Okay, say your protagonist is named Jane. Every occurrence of Jane’s name only nets you a single tick on the word counter. Now let’s say you use the find-and-replace function on your word processor to change “Jane” to “Jane Marie”. Presto! You’ve double your investment. This works especially well in fantasy novels, where a low-yield name like Hrudon can, with a single find-and-replace search, become “Hrudon, Son of Sankar, Prince and Overlord of Outer Cthandon.”
• De-hyphenated: Word-processing programs tend to count hyphenated words as a single unit. “Lilly-livered” is just one word; “not-quite-as-potent-as-promised fungicide” counts as only two words. Deleting your hyphens may lose you grammar points, but it will definitely gain you words when you are too tired to write anymore.
I say to myself: who better to tell me about word count than the creator of NaNoWriMo? XD
no subject
no subject