The other day I wrote a post about how to cheat your way through NaNoWriMo.
Keeping in mind that these things will not necessarily make you a good NaNo novel, or even a finished NaNo novel, just a longer NaNo novel, here's some more cheat codes!
6. What is your character thinking?
That long bit of narration and headwork that you know is bad writing, and if ever published would rival the likes of even Twilight? You know the one. Where your character goes off on a long rant about how pretty it is out, and how much he likes flowers, or whether he's really in love with Billy the Cheerleader or Mandy the Jock, or if he's going to risk buying some edibles from Cynthia and Harlan Mayweather, because yeah, obviously they make the best stuff in town, but their mother is sort of the evil overlord of earth and she has this really strict policy against drugs that Cynthia and Harlan probably only get away with because of nepotism....
That one? It goes nowhere, it's not entertaining, it contributes nothing, you could more concisely convey the same information in like two sentences tops?
Slap that bad boy down as drawn-out and useless as you like, my friend. First drafts are for play, final drafts are for serious work. Treat it like a free-write, like I just did up there; just set your fingers to the keyboard and let 'em fly! No one will know the difference.
Except for you, you dirty, dirty cheater.
7. Lavish description
Explain to me what the set looks like in vivid detail, tell me the exact shade of every single hair on the hero's head, and name every solitary scent in the princess's perfume; leave nothing unsaid, and employ every single last sense, even the extra ones! Come on, it'll be fun!
.... for you.
Look, description for the sake of description? As a reader, not my cup of tea. But because it's not my cup of tea, as a writer I tend to under-dress my sets, which is great for the stage, where creative directors want to have all the leeway they can get, but for novels that makes it difficult to keep the reader interested--you risk having talking heads and bland settings.
It's just so damn easy to overdo it, though--so don't even worry about it. Just overdo it right from the start, all the words you want, all the description you like. Then deal with the merciless cutting and hacking later, like with everything else on this list.
8. Long dialogue
Now, it helps if your characters are witty. I know my characters having humorous back-and-forths about innocuous things (at least, innocuous to them) had to have made up at least a third of my NaNo Novel last year--my characters were funny, and if they wanted to show it off, who was I to stop them?
I also delivered a lot of exposition through dialogue, which can also boost word count depending on how it's done, but witty dialogue is probably the best for boosting word count--even if it's just the characters thinking that they're witty. Sometimes the more so, even, because people thinking they're witty tend to stumble and need correcting more often than others.
You can also employ speech patterns to your advantage--in one of my WIPs from a while back a few of my characters have a habit of saying one another's names as a method of establishing dominance in a conversation, and I've had a character or two who liked to loop themselves around in webs of metaphor or simile, or who just plain liked run-on sentences (for whatever weird, totally not based-on-a-real-person reasons).
As long as you keep those characters talking, your word count will keep climbing. BUT....
9. Try to avoid floating heads, but don't bite yourself if you can't
Talking heads are terrible for a whole host of reasons I'll probably get into at some other time, but for now just know that a talking head occurs in a story when a character, or several characters, talks for an extended length of time with very few or no dialogue or action tags--so for six pages on end, there's just talk talk talk blather blather blather.
And I get why--I've certainly done it before, it's easy, it just keeps flowing and flowing and flowing, and once you hit that speech rhythm it's hard to stop!--but talking heads are secretly killing your word count. For every three spoken words you could be piling up a fourth outside of the quotation marks, just hanging out, relaxing, maxing all cool and the like; having your character perform actions as they speak will not only make your scene a million times more relevant/interesting, but it will also make that word count skyrocket, and, my good man or woman or nonbinary or genderless individual, I do believe that is why you are here.
And this one's not even a cheat! Totally legal.
10. Include needless scenes if need be
Much like those rambling headspace dealies, if there's a scene you know will never, ever make it into your finished novel, but you're running out of options? Toss it in there. Is it an AU fanfic of the story? In fact, is it a fanfic of any type? Did you write a poem or a short story? Do you have less respect for the novel in and of itself than for the creativity upon which NaNo was founded? Then toss it the fuck in, my friend!
Tons of people do this--rather than attempt to write a novel this upcoming NaNo, a lot of people will attempt to slap down 50k in blog posts, in short stories, in poems, in paperwork, in scattered bits and pieces of whatever they can write in a month, because to a lot of people, NaNoWriMo is less about the novels than it is about the creativity and the community and the kinship you find within those thirty days. NaNoWriMo is about more than writing novels, guys; it's about using the constraints of time to accomplish a creative goal, with an army of like-minded individuals to back you up.
So maybe finishing your novel isn't going to be what's up this NaNo, but creativity will be, and part of creativity is knowing when to adapt your goals and the methods you use to get to them.
Maybe that means using this list of technically-not-really-cheats to flesh out your word count for your novel; maybe that means writing at certain times of the day when you know you're at your creative peak.
Or maybe it means deciding that a novel was never the real goal in the first place.
Happy NaNoing my friends! ... Even if it is February....
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