Saturday, October 05, 2002

Word Count Tips

Yes, it’s only October 5th, but I thought everyone who is participating in or supporting NaNoWriMo should be thinking of ways to increase word count. Here are a few of mine from last year:

1. Stylistically violate hyphenation and compound word rules. Substitute farm boy for farmboy or farm-boy. In my case, I just avoided the compound word postman and referred to him as the postal carrier. Don’t use hyphenates, instead, put them in quotes. A character with a holier-than-thou attitude suddenly has a “holier than thou” attitude. Suddenly his one word attitude is now three. If you don’t like the quotes, try italics (but that has a negative impact on my typing speed).

2. Do Not Use Contractions. My personal study of my manuscript has led me to believe that I could up my word count by as much as 8% by eliminating contractions. That does not count the colloquial use of words like “gotta” in dialogue.

3. Address all of your characters by their full names. Give them long names, if necessary, make them southern so they can be naturalistically three to four words, like Miss Emma Jane Browning or Jimmy Joe Rand.

4. Choose multiple word placenames. Why have your characters live in Erie, Pennsylvania when they can live in Lake Oswego, New York?

5. Pick a phrase to use often when something happens in the book, as a sort of commentary. Like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.‘s use of “and so it goes.” whenever someone died. Pick an event to use the phrase with, preferably something that happens a lot. Maybe your character is on a road trip, pick a phrase to use whenever you mention having to go to the bathroom, fill up the gas tank or feeling tired.

6. Have a character who is a religious zealot and have them pop up and quote Bible verses.

In reality, I didn’t use any of these to gain wordcount. The only thing that I did that was just for the words was one day when I was stuck, I went ahead and shifted the location of the chapter to a high school English class and assigned five of the characters to read one page from their journals. That chapter was 2,498 words. All in less than three hours. It’s something that would come out of the finished manuscript, but it was invaluable for me to do it as an exercise.

POSTED BY Cybele AT 7:40 pm     NaNoWriMo

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During November it's all about me writing a novel. Sometimes it's about whalewatching. You know, and then there's other stuff.