An Insider's Guide to Cheating NaNoWriMo

Disclaimer: These techniques are for entertainment purposes only and should be performed by trained professionals.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
(I've always wanted to say that)

This was sort of started in another thread, but I was amusing myself with ways of artificially bumping up the word count, here are some of my favorite ideas:

1. Inventing the alien race that speaks a language that consists of very long sentences filled with 2 to 3 letter words.

2. Add a character who is hard of hearing so the dialogue needs to be replaced repeated 5 to 6 times in order to continue.

3. Give the protagonist's long names like Billy Joe Jim Bob Smith-Horowitz.

4. Have the characters perform three acts of a Shakespearean play.

5. Have the antagonist sing 100 bottles of beer on the wall from the beginning to the end. (Or 100 tankards of ale of you are in the fantasy genre)

6. Whenever possible during dialogue scenes have a loud TV in the background spilling into their conversation especially useful are jingles for personal injury attorneys and taglines for upcoming action blockbusters.

7. Going shopping? Maybe your characters can happen to need the same exact things that you're going to shop for. Have one character make a list of things to buy for another.

8. Have one character quiz another on the periodic table of elements.
8b. Have the character get one wrong and have to start again from the beginning.

9. Create a time loop where everything that happens in the previous chapter happens again in the current chapter, but this time the cake is chocolate.

10. Put catnip on the keyboard and let you cat go nuts.

(Can I reemphasize this is a joke so nobody things I am really doing this?)

lol Thanks I needed a good laugh to get me through this very intense scene I've been beating myself over!

Totally love it. A book should be written on it. Perhaps a character could write a book in the novel about cheating nano. :-D

11. Have two people who cannot speak the same language, but a row of people who have various languages in common with each other, thus requiring five people to translate amoung different languages back and forth. (Thank you "I Love Lucy")

12. Have sporadic drinking songs that involve a lot of "Hey Hey Hey," "Ho Ho Ho" and "Yo Ho Ho" type verses. (Thank you JRR Tolkien)

13. You can get at least 10 pages out of the following dialog:
"No I didn't," he says.
"Yes you did," she says.

14. Have someone quote from the works of an author whose words sound suspiciously like a cut and past of something you wrote last year.

15. On the protagonist's birthday, have then read aloud every birthday card he/she gets until Target kicks you out of the store.

11. Have two people who cannot speak the same language, but a row of people who have various languages in common with each other, thus requiring five people to translate amoung different languages back and forth. (Thank you "I Love Lucy")
I love this. For real.

Nano cheating is great fun - here's another one:
There tends to be a lot of magic in my stories and yelling of spells. One *could* take lengthy sections of song lyrics, translate them to latin and then use them as spells which need to be repeated.
You know...not that I've ever done that or anything...

Make your characters play hide and seek and actually write out every single number from a countdown from one hundred or two hundred, or one million. Bonus points if you write all of the numbers without hyphens.

By my math you would only need to count down from 19353 plus "Ready or not here I come" in order to get 50,000 words

yes, instead of writing I worked that out

Well then I know what my novel will be about next year.

16. Need long disjointed diatribe with many words and phrases that don't seem to go anywhere. (Like Lucky in Waiting for Godot)