'Padding' Your Word Count ~ You can make it, just believe in the Power of your NaNo! :)

Put a space between a word and a dash/elipsis, and the dash/elipsis counts as one word.
Also small words count the same as large ones. And writing "do not" instead of "don't" etc helps too :)

ALAN :D

Won't going back through and making those changes take just as long as, you know *writing* more words? ::confused::

Better to not go back or advise folks to do so. Better if you want to do that stuff to take it up from here and just keep going.

It is too easy when you go back to start getting stuck on details and be tempted to use the delete key.

The biggest thing is to give yourself permission to write anything and everything that comes to mind. Just let the words out, even if you are typing your state of mind or mental arguments about the characters.

Don't stop, don't go back. Just write.

You are doing great.

Important things to remember during NaNoWriMo:

You can still do this! Trust me, I know you can.
You don’t have to spell check
Grammar is optional
Editing comes later
And a plot is used for gardening

My advice, as someone who is on quite a low word count, would be to allow the characters' minds to wander. My main character was sitting thinking about religion and she started comparing it to a book. I admit that if you read what I wrote this morning it would seem like a book review, but words are words.

Although I've not got a lot of words it is a personal best.

when writing dialogue instead of just simply saying he said or she said, expand it to he spoke with a husky edge to voice that wrenched up the feelings that she did not want to acknowledge. i have been adding around three extra words to all he said she said bits and it is helping to describe the emotions and expressions of my characters.

hope this helps

Don't forget facial expressions, hand gestures, motion. Walking around a room, picking up props, throwing things.

I've found if I say the words out loud and pay attention to what my body wants to do and write that in. I get a lot more words.

Important things to remember during NaNoWriMo:

You can still do this! Trust me, I know you can.
You don’t have to spell check
Grammar is optional
Editing comes later
And a plot is used for gardening

Words are words and that is what matters. How it looks is a December problem. For now it is getting them out of your head that matters.

Seems to me that a discussion on religion could be very complicate, even if she was talking to herself.

You are doing fine. Just keep at it.

Important things to remember during NaNoWriMo:

You can still do this! Trust me, I know you can.
You don’t have to spell check
Grammar is optional
Editing comes later
And a plot is used for gardening

I'll be padding my word count by giving one of my characters a stammer. It's partly an exercise to exorcise (hah!) my frustrations about my own speech problems by attempting to type a written representation of what it must be like to try talking to me. But I'd be lying if I said that the decision was absolutely nothing to do with every fifth word or so quadrupling its count tally as the character attempts to pronounce it.

I think I have the perfect character for NaNo.
She's an apprentice technomancer with a very abstract mind, and tends to occasionally get lost in and give voice to whatever random thoughts are in her head if someone asks her a question. Like when a character in a conversation about nightmares asked her if she ever has nightmares, she started going on about how she has them sometimes, but they don't really scare her 'cos she figured out they only exist in her mind, then started wondering if the fact that they were scary meant that they weren't really nightmares, so started wondering out loud what the proper name for them would be, eventually settling on them just being thoughts about various things. Then she realised she was rambling and started talking about how she does that a lot because it's difficult to express thoughts clearly in only a few words. Then she became distracted by the TV set in the corner of the room and mentioned how they're quite inefficient and offered to take it apart and try to improve it for them.
If I had more characters like that, I could probably get the whole 50K out of a single conversation between them all. lol

DarK-RoniN
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"There's more to a bottle cap than keeping liquid from leaking out of glass."