Warning: Word count at all costs may be bad for the quality of your writing. If you’re absolutely determined to make that 50,000, here’s what I’ve tried so far.
Names: Somewhere around day nine, I started getting creative with names. Lots of characters needed hyphenated names, and boy oh boy, am I ever good at coming up with those!
Dialog: However, there’s a limit to how much word space you can occupy with names, so around day 11, I added in a character that’s just like the next door neighbor you park in the alley and climb over the back fence to avoid.
You know the kind of person I mean– the one who can spin a single sentence announcement, “Bob and I went to dinner at Trough-O-Rama with Buddy and Sue” into a fifteen minute dialog, complete with blow by blow description of the event plans, from the first moment of phone tag to the final discovery of water spots on the flatware (imagine!).
I’ve cultivated the art of climbing back fences, but I’ve been caught often enough that I decided I could boost my word count by adding in the gabby neighbor. That lasted until I died of boredom on page three of the monologue about the rude salesperson at Walmart (imagine!).
Correspondence: Correspondence is not dead! E-mail can be artistic! Therefore, I’ve included a few of her relevant letters in the text.
Blog posts: If all else fails, there are blog posts to paste in. I’m sure they’ll contribute the quality of the story.
Unfortunately, even with all these ideas, my word count just dropped because I can’t stand writing horridly. Ugh! Once I peeled out the extras, I’m nowhere near my word count goal. Maybe if I added this post to the story?
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