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 Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 9:07 am
(X-posted to the wrimobuddies community on LJ, so if you've seen it twice that's why.)
If this isn't allowed I'll delete the entry or a mod can delete it, I won't feel hurt or anything. BUT I came across something in No Plot? No Problem! that I thought might be helpful. I know not everyone has the book so I figured I'd share here. It's about word padding. I won't quote the entire thing, but a few highlights...
* "Afflict one of your characters with a stutter, and it doubles the girth of their dialogue, and it also allow the supporting cast to spend several pages wondering in great, wordcount bolstering detail about the sudden, mysterious onset of the speech impediment." (Had to quote that word for word, it was funnier that way.)
* Temporary deafness. You'll have to repeat everything... repeatedly.
* Dream sequences and hallucinations add extra words without messing up your plot since they never happened.
* "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 thousand of words to your count." (Personally I'm staying away from that one but maybe someone might want it. Hey, have your character read No Plot? No Problem! *L*)
* Extend your character's name. "This works especially well in fantasy novels, where a lowyield name like Hrudon can, with a single find-and-replace search, become Hrudon, Son of Sankar, Prince and Overlord of Outer Cthandon." Or you could just do the Jane to Jane Marie thing they suggest.
* Don't use hyphens. Apparently a lot of word processing programs count hyphenated words as one word so just take out the hyphen and POOF you've got more words!
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Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 9:15 am
rofl
Brilliant. Simply brilliant.
On the subject of long character names, why not long titles? I keep adding to my title all the time... it's almost 30 words last time I checked. XD
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Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 8:34 pm
rofl I've been word padding by calling one of my characters Baron Montressor... Saying "baron" has added 282 words... then there's Duke Endymion... he needs more parts in the story... xd
...internal monologue can potentially go on forever... I make such brooding characters.... and I have three brooding main characters and I'm the omniscient narrator!
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Posted: Tue Nov 14, 2006 8:42 pm
Another cute little tip is to write out numbers like:
$5.00 = Five dollars
500 = Five hundred
$595.67 = Five hundred ninety-five dollars and sixty-seven cents
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 6:16 am
I insisted on hitting 25,000 words yesterday but I was at... I think something like 24,945 so I ended up adding a few extra sentences about my main character's cat.
I also added a random sex dream in there because 1) DREAM SEQUENCE FTW and 2) What's funnier than a sexy sexy dream that ends in one of the people meowing because in reality the dreamer's cat is meowing to wake them up. And of course I ended the dream before anything interesteing happened because I am mean. mrgreen
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 12:03 pm
Great suggestions!
What I'm doing, besides some of the tricks already mentioned, is writing all of the boring stuff first. Well, I hope it's not really that boring, but I'm writing all the less important stuff. Major plot events have placeholders like this:
(BIG FIGHT SEEN GOES HERE. X DIE, Y SURVIVE, Z RUNS AWAY.)
The fight scene itself I go back to later and elaborate on. So yeah... for the month of November, filler, filler, filler! Then you can concentrate on crucial scenes when you have more time... like December or January. :3 This way, if I'm running out of "filler scenes" at 45,000 words, I still have all the important stuff to easily add 5k. smile
Oh, we're all so sneaky, us NaNoers! ninja
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:09 pm
Wow. Those are all great ideas, and I'm sort of wondering why I haven't been using any of them. Suffice it to say I'm one of those writers that's to busy getting the general plot down to worry about filling anything in. Mostly it's just boring dialog. Descriptions don't come in until after the first revision. Which nearly doubles a chapter's length (ex. Ch. 1 @ 2,500 words jumps to 5,000 + words).
If I run out of plot before 50,000, I'll just go back and start adding the descriptions I left out. ^_^
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 4:10 pm
I've definitely been doing that writing-out-numbers thing for a while. It's just great! 3nodding
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 5:16 pm
These are all great suggestions. I should really start using some of them. XD
What I did, and this started accidently, but whenever one of my characters tries to make a big, important speech, I have the other characters constantly interupt him. Which of course, leads to much yelling of "Would you just-" [insert interuption here][counter interuption]"As I was say-"[interuption]" and so on, and so on, usually ending with some kind of mental breakdown.
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 7:27 pm
The book doesn't mention this one, but And Paying in Naivety has it:
When in doubt, write smut.
mrgreen
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Posted: Wed Nov 15, 2006 10:30 pm
*laughs* I think that's because the book is supposed to be kiddie safe. Smut would dirty their little minds and make them into lusting little imps that are more horny than a lonely bunny!
Or something.
>>
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Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 5:24 am
Yeah smut is always good and makes for the best dream sequences I think. whee
Since I've got it planned out I'm already writing my novel's epilogue. I don't know if I'll count those words in my total right now or not since I'm keeping it in a different document and odds are I'll be too lazy to add it in every time.
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Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 11:14 am
Oh, today I didn't have anything in particular to write about so I had one of my characters as the other to tell them their favorite childhood memory. Besides getting extra character info I got to start it off with him trying to think of one, so there was some "Uh... I'm not sure... I think it might have been..." kind of stuff.
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Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 7:08 pm
Yes, I won't deny it. I write smut for word padding, usually in dreams or awkward interactions between characters. However, I hate written smut because I find that most often it's either too romanticized or its the whorish sex-in-an-alley kind of smut. There's never an in-between. xp
I'm determined to make one smut scene last for 3k words. xD That'll be fun.
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Posted: Thu Nov 16, 2006 7:25 pm
hiriyou Yes, I won't deny it. I write smut for word padding, usually in dreams or awkward interactions between characters. However, I hate written smut because I find that most often it's either too romanticized or its the whorish sex-in-an-alley kind of smut. There's never an in-between. xp I'm determined to make one smut scene last for 3k words. xD That'll be fun. I found a great way to pad the smut scenes that I use for padding, too. xD I make it start out all hormone-driven and then one person ends up either in pain or not wanting to do it, so they stop and understand what's going on, then they go at it full tilt afterward. =3 Makes it last another 500 words at least.
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