8. How do I increase word count in a finished project?

First, my general conviction is that, just adding in content to bulk up word count is bad news. It’s probably going to feel artificial to the reader. But I do have an experience where I took a 10k word novella and turned it into a 40k word story. To do this, I had to completely expand and reimagine my story. My novella centered around a group of students inventing an RPG poetry game (think of a light Dungeons and Dragons where players are poets, writing poems, instead of warriors and wizards) and eventually getting it used in a high school classroom. Later, as I reimagined this story, I started with a student with mental health issues reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis (with themes of social outcast and social anomaly) who meets a dimensional being seeking to give him life counsel. This student then goes to a high school where the poetry club is developing the RPG poetry game. The faculty thinks the game is too fun-oriented—so the theme of outcast and anomaly which is experienced by my student with mental health issues is echoed on an organizational/institutional level, as the poetry club students argue with their teachers to have this fun, educational game incorporated into classroom practice, and are eventually shut down. Like I said, I went from 10k words to 40k words, but I had to reimagine the story and its major themes.  

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