How to Increase Your Novel’s Word Count – Expanding Existing Material

In my last few blog posts, we have been looking at how to cut your book’s word count. However, you might have the opposite problem and need to increase your book’s word count. If this is the case, then this is the guide for you! There are two ways that you can increase your novel’s word count – you can either expand the story you do have, or you can add entirely new material. In this blog post, we will be focusing on how you can use the existing material to build up your story, with a later one looking at how to create new elements. Before we start, we will quickly look at why you need to meet your target word count and how to set this target.

Having too few words in your book may mean that publishers will not even consider it, as it does not meet the average length for your genre. If your book is too short, readers may feel that they are not getting their money’s worth or simply that the story is cut short and doesn’t have depth. To calculate how long your book should be, look at other books in your genre and check their word count. This will give you a good idea of the expectations, so try to match this as much as possible. Most novels are around 100,000 words, but you will know best what is normal for your niche.

Characterisation

One of the first things to consider when looking to extend your novel is whether you can add anything to your characters. A fun way to do this is to try to learn more about your characters yourself by stopping to write a bit about each of them. If they don’t have much backstory, add to it. Think about what drives them and why they act the way they do, even if they only have a minor role in your plot. Obviously, you won’t want to include all of this in the book as it might detract from the actual storyline, but it should help you to add to the scenes they appear in.

Add Complications

You could also add new problems for your characters to face. In your book, your characters should have one main objective that they are striving for, but they will keep being slowed along the way by new obstacles. Essentially, this is the plot of any story, so one of the easiest ways to extend your novel is simply to add to either your main plot or subplots with new obstacles. Doing this creates conflict and drama in your novel, so readers should be more engaged, both with the story and the characters. You want readers to care about the characters and what happens to them, so showing how they react to and deal with new problems is a great way to make them more relatable.

Look through books that you have enjoyed in the same genre as your own. See if you can separate the main plot and however many subplots there are. Examine these plot threads to see when obstacles come up and how they are overcome. This should give you an idea of how many you need in your own book. Next, do the same with your novel – separate out the plot threads, summarising the objective for your characters and the obstacles they face. This should highlight where there is room to add a few more problems, as well as give you the chance to check that all the existing obstacles have been resolved.

Extend Timeline

On a similar note, you could also extend the timeline that the events of your novel take place over. For example, if it originally all happened within two weeks, try extending this to a month and planning out what changes this might make. Stretching out the timeline of your novel should give you room to add new complications, as above, without everything seeming squashed together. Once your characters have some more time, they might be able to travel to some new places and have important encounters or discover relevant information at these. This should give you chance to add more description and possibly even new characters. At the very least, there will be the opportunity to add characterisation to those you already have.

Expand Description

Another way to increase your word count is simply to extend descriptive sections. Go through your book and identify areas where you could add a bit more to make a description richer, whether it is of a place or a character. However, do this cautiously, as you don’t want to risk your readers losing interest. For example, you don’t need a lot of description for a fast-paced action scene, as this will break the immersion.

Wrapping Up

It can be difficult to expand a novel that is too short, so I hope this helps you to get started! If you still need to add more, my next blog post looks at how to increase your word count by adding entirely new content, so come back in two weeks for that!

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