10 Dirty Ways to Reach 50,000 Words in NaNoWriMo

When taking on the task of creating a 50,000 word manuscript for National Novel Writer’s Month (NaNoWriMo) one should be prepared to pad their stories just a little bit.  There are plenty of ways to add extra words, some of them quite dirty. 

I was perusing the forums at NaNoWriMo.org and found a couple discussions on dirty, cheap ways to reach 50,000 words.  The rules for National Novel Writer’s Month do state that you can’t type the same word 50,000 times, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of the cut and paste feature in other ways.  I haven’t decided if I’ll be making use of some of these tricks or not, guess it depends on how desperate I get.  Of course some of the ‘tricks’ sound a lot like regular exposition too.

Ten Cheap, Dirty Ways to Reach 50,000 Words

1. Type one word such as ‘potato’ between every other word in your novel.  (courtesy of satachan)

2.  Remove all contractions, like ‘don’t’ becomes ’do not’.  (courtesy of J. Kreth)

3. Copy and paste extensive sections from early on in the book into the later sections of the book and call them flashbacks. (courtesy of Fallen Grace)

4. Paste in lots of song lyrics. (courtesy of Romancegirl for her idea to keep replaying love songs each time her characters meet) 

5. Have your characters write up every article, blog post and report that you also end up writing during the month of November.  (Courtesy of Erin Kelly)     

6. Describe each new character introduced in the story in detail, then copy and paste in every time that character shows up again.  (Courtesy in part to MelBell for her lovely descriptive in the 50,000 words forum.)

7. Break up the scenes/sections in your story with stars (**) or some other symbol such as the wingdings type font, as your computer will recognize them as words. (courtesy of ShadowedWhispers)

8. Create very long chapter titles including chapter synopsis’ for each chapter of your book. (courtesy of SnowLhite)

9. Add a long famous quote to the beginning of your book and each chapter and the end and anywhere else you can think up.  (courtesy of me)

10. Use lots of hyphens between words but put a space before the hyphen and after the hyphen so your hyphenated word will register as three words by the computer. (courtesy of GeorgeEliot)  

There you have it, 10 down and dirty ways to reach 50,000 words in your manuscript for NaNoWriMo.  It’s entirely up to you whether or not you wish to take advantage of these little tricks…