How To Increase Your Word Count

You probably have a word count you’d like to meet during the month of April. Here’s how to increase it and come out a winner by the end of Camp NaNoWriMo.

Spell out numbers.

Especially long numbers. 22. Twenty-two. 25485697. Twenty-five million, four hundred eighty-five thousand, six hundred ninety-seven. That’s practically an entire sentence right there.

Refer to characters by their full name.

Don’t just call your characters by first name. Middle and last names exist for a reason. Mary Jane Smith walked to the store. Mary Jane Smith bought milk and eggs. Mary Jane Smith went home.

Repeat yourself.

Be repetitive. Be redundant. Say the same thing again and again. She was cold. She felt cold. Sometimes, you just have to hammer the point home. You can always claim you were going for a literary effect, a rhetorical flourish.

Add in adverbs.

Very. Really. Extremely.

Use conjunctions instead of punctuation. 

Conjunctions are words, but punctuation is not, and you need words if you want to reach a word count, so you can brag to the entire world about how great you are or you could keep that greatness to yourself.

Alas, following the above, you’ll have an awesome sentence like this one:

Mary Jane Smith felt very cold despite the thermostat reading twenty-two degrees Celsius, but even though Mary Jane Smith was really cold, she was also extremely hard at work on her novel.

This post is a joke just like this blog. So take my advice at your own peril.

Happy increasing your word count by writing actual words one after another.