📝 Productivity

📈 How to boost your wordcount during WorldEmber (without cheating)

When 10k feels like miles away, here are my best tips for boosting your wordcount without breaking any event rules!

TJ Trewin

10 Sep 2024 — 6 min read

Welcome to another not-sponsored-just-obsessed guide to WorldEmber! If you're not sure what it's about, check out the first post in this series that explains everything you need to know about the 10k worldbuilding marathon in December:

Table of Contents

⚖️ Rules refresher

From a technical standpoint, the World Anvil platform can only count words written in articles newly created during December of the event that are public (not private) and public (not drafts). It doesn't all have to be in the same world!

⚠️

Always check the official challenge page for the latest rules for the event!

🔨 Focus on things that count

As we know the limitations of the event - this means that if you write a bunch of lore using the following World Anvil features it won't count towards your WorldEmber wordcount (once this year's event is live I will update this list if anything changes):

Articles created before the event
The world homepage & world meta
Category pages
Manuscripts
Maps and map pin content
Timelines, chronicles, and their events
Family trees, bloodlines, and organization charts
Interactive tables (BBCode tables do count)
Tagged lists
Images (sadly they are not worth 1,000 words)

So - if your goal is to boost your wordcount during WorldEmber, then focus solely on writing in newly created articles!

This also means that you can prepare things for any of these features in advance to supplement your WorldEmber articles. For some ideas (including some that aren't listed above) check out my guide on preparing in advance:

💡

It can be useful to have a handful of blank pre-made articles in case you want to write something that you don't want included in the event (such as non-worldbuilding content).

📈 10 things you can do to boost your wordcount during WorldEmber (without cheating):

📝 Fill in more fields of the article templates
Add some things in the sidebar, add a meaningful subheading, and consider updating the mouseover snippet if you want to make a TL;DR summary appear when you hover over links to that article.
🗺️ Plan out related articles and write sets of them
Writing a set of related articles can help you really get in the flow and you'll likely find it easier to make connections between them and expand their lore. Examples of this could be: types of magic, different guilds and their interactions, locations within a city, characters of a family or organization, species of a certain biome.
🔗 Link to more existing articles in your world
Here's a fun writing exercise you can try! Get two random existing articles of yours and try to figure out a connection between them. Bridge the gap with a new article to make your world feel more alive and lived in.
😍 Write what you love
It sounds stupidly obvious - but write what you enjoy the most! If you struggle writing certain types of article templates, do more of the ones you love. This applies to topics, too - what are your favourite hobbies and interests? Are there ways to include references (even if obscure) to these in your world?
Also if you have more than one world/setting - switch it up if you're not feeling like writing in one or the other!
💭 Ask people for feedback or input
If you're feeling stuck and aren't sure what else you can add - just ask people! Make a global notification, leave a note in the author's comments section of your article, or post a question in Discord or Reddit.
😌 Write at good time of day and minimise your distractions
This is much easier said than done, but anything that can improve your mood will have a hugely positive influence on your creative writing. Let your partner, family, or friends know that you'll be busy during certain times of the day to focus on reaching your goal.
Words spent chatting in Discord don't count towards WorldEmber!! 😂
👀 Describe the senses in your article
This is something that I often notice gets overlooked in worldbuilding articles - most people cover the visual descriptions but what does the atmosphere feel like? What can you hear, feel, smell, or even taste? Covering these bases will not only add extra words but also extra immersion to your world.
⚔️ Add history and impact
There's always room for extra history in your worldbuilding articles. Add some background context and describe the impact upon the current article - or the impact the article subject had/is having upon the world.
🎯 Don't edit until you've passed your WorldEmber goal!
Don't do it! Deleting words make number go down! You want that wordcount number to go up until you reach your WorldEmber goal! 😅 Once you've gone over the mark and have some buffer room, then you can edit. Or just save it all for the new year!
🎽 Pace yourself
It's a 10k writing marathon, so keep your sights on your goal and don't pay attention to how fast or flashy everyone else is running. It's just a fun community challenge - so enjoy yourself and don't push yourself to burnout.

For a deep-dive on how to keep pace without burnout during WorldEmber, I recently wrote about using the marathon mindset:

🙅‍♂️ Bad practises

Always check the challenge page for the current WorldEmber event to see what's allowed! Trying to cheat the system doesn't improve the quality of your worldbuilding and could get you disqualified.
Here are some things I'd advise steering clear of:

😣 BBCode bloat
Using BBCode to make fancy layouts and nice headings is absolutely fine! But if you're adding in long tables or extra features just for the sake of wordcount, don't go there. I do a lot of formatting in my articles to make them look nice, so I usually try to overshoot my wordcount goal to make up for this.
🤡 Copy & pasting
As mentioned earlier, re-using your old work is against the spirit of WorldEmber, but so is copy/pasting sections to re-use across your newly written articles in December. If you need to include the same content in multiple places, it's good practise to use a variable!
🤐 Excessive use of hidden content
Including some subscriber-only containers and secrets are okay if they're relevant! But using them to cheat the system is a fast way to get disqualified, and it's easy to spot if your wordcount says 10,000 but you've got ten articles that appear to have only 300 words each.
🙄 Expanding and lengthening sentences by adding extra, redundant, and unnecessary words
See what I did there? You're not in school trying to meet essay requirements, you're here to have fun and worldbuild! :D
🥱 Worldbuilding for the sake of it
It can feel tempting to just write about something random and insignificant just to reach your goal sooner, but this can quickly lead to burnout and may leave you with boring articles that you're not proud of and need a lot of editing later (ask me how I know).
😒 Pre-writing content before the event
That's a no-no and will get you disqualified. If you're bringing in pre-written content (like notes from a TTRPG campaign, or previously written lore), then make sure to create some articles before the event starts, or hold off uploading them until you've finished.

Brainstorming some ideas before WorldEmber begins is encouraged (especially during November's prep-month)! Just leave them at the stage of idea seeds that you can grow into full concepts later 🥰