NANOWRIMO Dares 2003
Dares #1-500

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1. Have your main character refer to cheese at least three times, but only as a metaphor to describe another event or person
2. Have (one of) your main characters use the following phrase: "But show me a writer who, when not writing for pay, deliberately writes for fun or for self-expression, and I'll show you one of the rarest cases of freakish misapplication in the entire dime museum of human nature.”
3. Have a major character refer to another major character's "Jaunt of Terror." You can expound on this if you want, but it's probably not a good idea.
4. Have someone in your novel fall in love with the president of the United States (this is some--unknown president. He's unmarried
5. Have one of your characters go to an online school.
6. Introduce a character who plans to go to the supreme court to legally change his date of birth from January 18, 1975 to March 5, 1975...just because he feels like it. And have all the lower courts actually pass his case through.
7. Have a main character whose Indian name is Filthy Bear. He/she doesn't have to be filthy, or a bear. It's just a name. Also, if you wish, you may have a wise old tribe leader appear suddenly and give said character a long speech about the significance of this name
8. Make a cat explode in your novel for no good reason. Other possibility: have a character put a rat in a microwave just to see what happens
9. In your story, mention NaNoWriMo--only, it shouldn't be exactly NaNo as it is. It should be some twisted but still somewhat recognizable form of NaNo. Ideas I've come up with along these lines include a Reality Show about six people living in one house and trying to write 50000 words each in a month, or a pirate ship trying to obtain 50000 gold in one month, or a twist on the 'thousand cranes' origami thing featuring 50,000 cranes.
10. Have someone mention putting a popcorn bag in the microwave the wrong way (you know, THIS SIDE UP...) and then witnessing the microwave explode.
11. Write 2000 words about cooking an egg. Not eating the egg, just cooking it.
12. Have one of your characters be madly in love with Gilderoy Lockhart. They must declare it to their friends at least once in the novel. They are also completely aware that he is a fictional character, and are otherwise not crazy.
13. Include a character in your novel who can only speak gibberish. And have them say something that is vitally important for the other charactes to know, only they can't understand him/her.
14. Make reference to The Pentagon, non-dairy cheese food, the band Yo La Tengo, Glade air freshener, and failed sit-com pilots in the same paragraph. This paragraph must make sense (as must the references) and cannot occur in a dream sequence or dialog.
15. Have a character deliver the line "Forsooth! I am wholly stuck in the metaphysical toe cheese and am covered up to my scuppers!" The character cannot be insane, and this can't occur in a dream sequence, either.
16. Write an entire chapter without using the letter "e."*
17. Make a Monty Python reference at least once every 5000 words.
18. Turn on your radio to a music station. Develop a subplot around whichever song is playing.
19. Make one character constantly make reference to their dog being jealous of their cat or vice versa. for a conclusion of their randomness, have them say to the antagonist as a crucial point in the story "my cat's all huffy and puffy because my dog's litter box is bigger than his."
20. Have a character constantly pester others for jello recipes
21. Have a character obssessed with homestarrunner.com who constantly recites lines from the cartoons with zero explanation.
22. Have a random scene with a drug bust in a school cafeteria, which CANNOT be discussed later on or before. it must be just...random.
23. Have someone say "I like tomatoes..." whenever they mishear someone
24. Have an animal randomly say something. in english. it cannot be a fantasy book and your person cannot be crazy/dreaming/hearing things/etc.
25. Have a person always relating things in everyday life back to the romans
26. Have one character wear a cat collar as a bracelet, make constant references to it, then at the end, have the character give a response as to why. it cant be serious
27. In one scene have a person randomly run into the setting frantically asking if anyone has seen their chameleon. no explaining either.
28. Somewhere between 23K and 27K, have a character suddenly discover that he is closely related to a character in whom he or she is romantically interested. Your choice whether he or she stops pursuing the other or not.
29. Mention a zoo in the novel that keeps shoggoths. Optionally, show one of the characters feeding the shoggoths some penguins.
30. Have a group of people who wouldn't usually cheerlead do a cheer. For example: Yay! Rah! Roman Legion!* Lire
31. Have a character make a prank call, only to find out that they called the president and he/she is now -country here-'s most wanted.
32. Make one of your characters apply to be a contestant on the most wacky reality show you can invent
33. Have one of your characters grow pink bunnies or purple horns, or both, at some point in your novel. They can be removed eventually if you want, and they don't have to grow on the chracter's head. They can grow on the character's toes for all I care.
34. Include a talking cat named Pooky, who has pink hair. The characters will not wonder at the pink hair or at the fact that the cat talks. They will simply accept it when he says, "Hey, get me a beer, would ya?" or something like that.
35. Have a minor character attempt to cook an egg in the microwave, and get killed. I guess you could see this as an alternative to the funnier popcorn dare. ^^ Y'see, when you cook an egg in the microwave, the pressure gets built up really high and the door is blown off. Forcefully. So, if the person were standing right in front of it, it may very well cave in their skull. Yaaay! You can make it as gory and pointless as you want. It's all about the word count.
36. Put a random Buzz Lightyear doll into your story. Three times, about 5000 words apart, with no explanation as to why it is there. It just is. Occasionally, you can have it say "To Infinity, and BEYOOOND!" without anyone touching it, thus freaking out your protagonists.
37. Use the sentance: "And then we discovered that rhododendrons liked cuddling."
38. At the beginning, middle, and end of your novel your main character has to break into song. the first song: i like bread and butter (lyrics here). second song: beer barrel polka (lyrics). and third: i am the walrus (lyrics). but it can't be a dream sequence or musical setting (unless your novel is a musical, and if it is, good luck with it). preferred setting is when the main character is dealing with an authority figure of some sort.
39. Write an entire chapter from the point of view of a hamster. Feeeeeel the hamsterness
40. Have a character play either the tuba or euphonium and play in a group of tubas and euphoniums... called the Tubonium.
41. Have a minor character who thinks that he/she is a superhero. Cape is extra credit.
42. Have a character be phobic of the number four (the options are endless... no four-sided rooms, doors... possible amputation to get rid of fourth limb...)
43. Have a character with either a talking bellybutton, or who talks to their bellybutton.
44. Have a character who fights for the cause of Lightbulb Liberation!
45. Have an alarm clock that plays under the sea and then says "wake up! wake up!" that your character bought from a Korean store.
46. Have a blind character with a guide sheep. (sheep dog, anyone?)
47. Have one of your characters burst into laughter whenever they hear the word "muffin". The word "muffin" must be said several times throughout the book when the character can hear it.
48. Have a character/group of characters pass by two cops in a donut shop while one of the cops is saying, "... so she turns around and says, 'Is that a gun, or are you just happy to see me?' ... She seemed sad when I told her it was a gun and flashed my badge."
49. Make one of the antagonists in your story (major or minor) your high school English teacher. If you had multiple English teachers, use all of them!* (Sort of. I'm going to do this one with my 5th grade Reading teacher. She deserves to be in a novel.)
50. Include a cameo appearance with a major NPR figure.
51. Include a major NPR figure as a major character (Sylvia Poggioli fanfic, anyone?)
52. Include a sex scene with one or more NPR figure (Sylvia Poggioli/Carl Castle slash, anyone?)
53. I have a frog, his name is Michigan. He wants to hop through your novel.
54. Have a blind man who doesn't speak English in a wheelchair run off with your character's map while he/she is in a foreign country, leading them to meet a minor character and some girl who only knows how to say one thing in English: "Me love you long time."
55. Kill someone using a stiletto. And when I say "stiletto," I do not mean, "knife." I mean, "stiletto-heeled shoe."
56. The first line of your novel must be: "Six years later, the memory of raw fish cubes continued to haunt her."
57. In a conversation about liaisons of any kind, have a character retort, "You can liaison my ass any day."
58. Have a character who is obsessed with lightbulbs.
59. Have your first line be "Where the hell are my pants?"
60. Character A and Character B are laughing for no reason and have a piece of paper in their hand. Have [Authorative Figure] Character C walk in/approach them and ask what's going on. A and B say something about invisible ink and have to make up an explanation.
61. Begin the novel, "In retrospect, perhaps it hadn't been such a great idea to bring a nail gun to (school, work, etc.)" And then tell something tragic that resulted from the decision.
62. Start out your novel with "Jack, you asshole!" Stipulation: your main character cannot be named Jack.
63. Have a character that absolutly refuses to answer to his/her/its real name or anything similar to it.
64. Have a character coincidentally use the phrase "Mother Superior jumped the gun" in the context of a conversation, oblivious to the fact that it's a Beatles lyric. One or more other characters must make note of this, and possibly speculate on the powers of the "cultural subconscious" and/or synchronity.
65. One of my major characters works at a place called Burger Bucket. They serve burgers that are smaller than McDonald's, but larger than Krystal's, and they serve them in a bucket (a paper bucket, kinda like at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I'm thinking about six burgers fit in a bucket. For family dining, ya know?) I dare your main characters to have lunch there. If they happen to be served by a fat, balding, middle-aged, extremely friendly man named John, so much the better.
66. Have someone open up a cardboard box upside down (this side up arrow pointing down) and then its empty! Turn it right side up and open it and it's full (of whatever)! This doesn't have to be a fantasy/magic one. You could have a magic trick.
67. Have someone live through something no one could live through. A massacre, the eye of a hurricane, etc.
68. Have someone use a computer or typewriter and then realize one of the keys is missing. (Urban legend is that when the Clinton administration left the Capitol they took all the "W"'s with them)
69. Have someone break something advertised as unbreakable (like those plastic combs) and get really upset about it.
70. 3 references to sand art. That's all I ask.
71. A live chicken in a waterbed: not a dream. Imagine the havoc!
72. Have one character be addicted to Diet Coke; (s)he should go into violent rages like the Hulk whenever the vending machine runs out.
73. Encounter a monkey that wears pants
74. Have a character walk into a conversation where the following is being said without irony: "Okay, but I don't really see how that's relevant. I mean, the chocolate was one thing, but then that tractor-trailer crashed on I-80, and a thousand bananas spilled onto the highway. That can't be a coincidence."
75. If you aren't writing fantasy or historical fiction, have a character obsessed with the Victorian period who likes to wear bloomers when no one is watching.
76. Include a paragraph (or, for bonus points, a sentence) where the first letters of all the words spell out either 'antidisestablishmentarianism' or 'floccinaucinihilipilification’
77. Make a female character think that she signed the Declaration of Independence.
78. Create a religion based solely on the whims of one of your friends -- law, ethics, structure, etc. matches their viewpoints literally. Only difference, their higher power speaks to them through an action figure
79. Include a minor character that sits huddled in the corner at one point in your novel, quietly humming "la la la lallllal la" and rocking back in forth, at some point in your story
80. Or, a character that insists she was a panda in her past life.
81. Have someone mumble about the Evil Jester of Doomsville in their sleep. Whenever they sleep. Napping, coma, anything!
82. Include a short chapter in which the PoV is set in a rodent's eyes. So, include stuff like 'the cheese smelled amazing!' and 'i really need to sharpen my nails' and the like.
83. The physical description of a main character must match that of Harry Potter. Bonus for you if it's relevant at all.
84. If you were in Nano last year, mention your novel, by title of course, from last year
85. Somewhere in your book have someone mention that they are deathly afraid of chickens. There should be a reason for them saying this...
86. Explore how the chinese take-out carton symbolizes our own mortality.
87. Make every sentence alliterative.
88. Have a character get a fortune cookie containing a fortune intended for an undercover spy, bearing a secret message, and go on a long, meaningless tangent about what happened to that spy because he missed the note.
89. Write your NaNo in three parts, and name those three parts Ben is Never Home, Free Beer, and Stairwells are for lovers. Don't ask why, as it is a long story.
90. Start one of your chapters with "Meanwhile, back in communist Russia..."
91. I dare to make the spy say "..in bed and under the covers!" tacked onto whatever the cookie message is. (See #86)
92. I dare you to include a dream sequence involving the repeated failed sending of a Zipped PDF file. One of those dreams where you -have- to get something done; it's the most urgent thing EVER, but you -just can't do it-.
93. Open your novel/any chapter with, "...little did I know, he was eating glue on the other side of the door."
94. Somewhere, have someone say, "No cows! No cows!" and cover his/her head.
95. Spell out a secret message using the first letter/word of each sentence/paragraph. Like BEWARE OF SAUSAGE. I've always wanted to do something like that.
96. Name your main (or minor) characters after meat. Pastrami, salami, bologna, pepperoni....
97. Have a character dress in extremely clashing colors for the whole novel. Or, have a character dress in the same black clothing for the whole novel.
98. Kill someone using a banana peel--as with the stiletto thing, this can be done
99. Start a novel with "There once was a man from Nantucket..."
100. Someone who regularly gets hit by lightning-- no really injuries need to apply. However, they should get into a shouting match with the storm, insulting it or telling it to leave them alone... to which the storm retaliates by hitting them with lightning again. This can be dragged out/repeated as often as desired.
101. A character who has a pet Slime Mold
102. An allergy to shoes
103. Winning a contest for a trip to someplace completely undesirable. Second prize: a lifetime's supply of soda crackers... or maybe drill bits?*
104. I dare each and every one of you to take these dares you have accepted, and weave your story so that the inclusion of these esoteric items makes perfect sense.
105. At one point in the story, include a beagle named Fred who knows that he's in the story, but maintains that he can't give anything about the plot away because that would be "cheating".
106. I dare someone to write a paragraph (or two) or even a chapter if you feel rather feisty from the eyes of an animal. Just to throw things off a bit. Hell, if you're using the blown cat then you could write it from the cat's perspective and suddenly, no cat! perfect!!
107. I dare someone to have a character, male or female, who calls their private part "My Precious"
108. Have a character Alien or otherwise that only has one very large eye and is wearing a giant eye patch.
109. Have one of your main characters say (while scratched up and bloodied): "Well how was I supposed to know that cats don't like to be picked up by the tail?!"
110. Make all the lines of one character be either quotes from Star Wars or from any Monty Python movies and still have all their dialogue make perfect sense in the context of the novel
111. Kill off a character by having them mummified in toilet paper.
112. Pick somebody who's written to one of these fora, construct a biography, run with it.
113. Or, pick a nanowrimo partner, preferably someone you don't know personally, and both of you vow to include each other in your stories.
114. Include an office memo Cat! Who runs from cube to cube with sticky notes covering its body.
115. have a character who is completely obsessed with linoleum - just obsessed looking at it, though. they have to have a complete phobia of touching it, especially with exposed skin.
116. Have some dark, foreboding figure say, "Come to the dark side.....we have cookies."
117. Have a scene where the person owns an old car, and they can't get the hood up, because when it was in the mechanic's last, they left a wrench in there, and it's up against the latch, preventing it from moving. Come up with a completely unique way of getting it loose.
118. Reference Boy George in the dialogue. For no logical reason. But make it sound like it was perfectly natural for him to be referenced.
119. Include a person who randomly says different algebraic and geometric formulas, but other than that they are normal. So all of a sudden they would say "a squared plus b squared equals c squared."
120. Make a female character madly in love with a cabbage, named Jeff. She doesn't understand why her soul mate is a cabbage.
121. A character's phobia is watermelon- invent a scientific/Latin name for the phobia. make it link into his/her deep past.
122. One person does random things, as they believe that life is a dream and they are really a butterfly (This is a GREAT excuse for random things happening)
123. Someone's favorite food is masking tape
124. Use the word Milonga
125. Name a character Booty Fatpants
126. Have one of your characters be made over by The Fab Five from Queer Eye For the Straight Guy.
127. Have one of your characters to randomly grab someone and dance with them if male, or randomly be grabbed and pulled into a dance if female. So many variables! Does your character know this dance? Do the rest of the characters/watching mob grab dance partners and join? Is it il/legal/mandatory to have street dancing in your town/city/country/galaxy? If NOT on Earth, do NOT use a known dance, make one up, including name of dance!
128. Mario wants to be involved in your novel. At least three times. As a video game character, as a pizza delivery man, whatever. Just include Mario!
129. Randomly slip in paraphrased Matrix speeches. "...deja vu? Oh my god! The walls aren't the same color!" (corny, but I can't think of anything else...heh)
130. Have your characters go white water rafting. Bonus points if they go rafting on the Gauley river (I'm a bit of a rafting nut), located in WVa.
131. Include phrases like "snootchie bootchies" and "Snootch to the Nooch" or other random phrases from Jay and silent bob.
132. Have your main character break out in song every time someone says today, but the songs must be from school house rock
133. In a situation where at least three characters need to get somewhere fast but their preferred method of transportation is broken down (or died if it's a pack animal of any kind) a car/spaceship transportation vehicle/cart full of horses whips around a particularly sharp corner and the last vehicle/spaceship/horse/dragon/etc falls off a few feet from your characters, keys in the ignition/etc or fully fed and rested and ready to go. Oh, and grinning, if it's alive (as if to say "Here I am, ready to save the day!") in any shape or form.
134. Have a character be totally obsessed over a show or a comic that's unrealistic(Buffy, Dragon Ball, stuff like that), believing they are real and constantly saying things about it and the characters. Like: Whaaaa!! Save me Spiderman!
135. Include a grapefruit named Bob. His ability to talk is up to your discretion.
136. A scar in a visible place, in the shape of a tic-tac-toe board. Just think of the fun characters could have, with some washable markers....
137. Compulsive Knitting Disorder
138. A character who, through an as-yet unspecified Freak Accident, has gained the ability to project his inner monologues on those scrolling billboards. Though, of course, the character can't control this ability....
139. A hospital emergency room scene in which a bunch of clowns have gotten stuck in their tiny car
140. A character who happens to emit a signal which always sets off anti-theft systems and metal detectors, in stores, libraries, airports, courtrooms... and how he deals with this ailment (to add a twist, he can't tell anyone the truth, as he has a paranoid fear that if anyone knew the government would want to dissect him and find out how it worked)
141. Have someone mistake a fire hydrant for a murderous axe-wielding gnome...but make this somehow crucial to the story
142. Reference a secret society of something completely random, ex. - the secret society of tattoo artists, or the secret society of bag ladies
143. Have one of your characters walk by an acquaintance's computer one evening and see the following excerpt of an Instant Message conversation: 69Factorial: "okay now picture this x = -2rcos(p) + 2cos(p)/r - 2r^3cos(3p)/3; y = 6rsin(p) - 2sin(p)/r - 2r^3sin(3p)/3; z = 4log®) & the lights r dim, ok? & their r candles" HottieSquared: "hehe + my neglige is a MINIMAL SURFACE get it? lolol" the equation, if you want to know, is that of the Verrill Minimal Surface.
144. Use the concept of the California recall election in their novel, though not specifically that election.
145. Get a character drunk and in bed with somebody of the same sex.
146. New dare (more of a double dare, actually; I may do it in my novel too): Old novels would often have long "In which..." chapter titles, such as Chapter 4: In which Mr. Scrupulous attends a most unusual dinner party. Bring back this convention in your novel, but with a twist: the event referenced must always be an extremely minor one in the chapter, for example Chapter 12: In which a plate is tragically broken, or Chapter 16: In which Mr. Scrupulous drives six Mph above the speed limit.
147. Include a character who has repeated amnesia, i.e. wakes up the next morning and can't remember who they are or how they got there. This happens to them repeatedly
148. Have a minor character who has a compulsion to untie shoelaces.
149. Have a character believe that there is something wrong with the outgoing mail function of their snail mail-United States Post Office mailbox. As a result, they use other people's mailboxes and have their own reasons as to why they think it will work better than their own.
150. Make a character seem the opposite gender than what they actually are, and then towards the very end, say something that obviously shows they are their actual gender.
151. Start your chapters with pseudo-profound epigrams all quoting a single fictitious person. At the climax, when the true villain is revealed (assuming your story works this way), it turns out to be THE PERSON YOU'VE BEEN QUOTING!
152. OK, something that one of the RAs I work with (I work night security in a residence hall at the University I attend) said to one of the others last night, and which I dare one of your characters to say: "Come on, (insert other character name here). Don't you want me to beat you up for a few minutes?" Also: "Let me kick you in the balls."
153. Include a character named Josh. Include a scene with a character who tries to argue the possibility (without meeting him) that Josh is actually female.
154. Include in your book The Twelve: the Poet, the Physician, the Farmer, the Scientist, the Magician, and the other so-called gods of our legends (though gods they were)
155. Have a character order a meal at a small sidewalk café, only to be knocked down and have their food stolen by a small macaque (NOT a baboon. Make this clear). The waiter will refuse to believe them. Bonus points if it happens on a date. The scene should NOT take place anywhere macaques might normally be found.
156. If you're going to do that I also add to the dare. You should also include the phrase "I'm not even supposed to be here today." at least once. (See #129)
157. Name your characters in order of their appearance in alphabetical order, if you get to Z start over. All characters named must follow this rule, with the exception of other dares characters. Bonus points if you add the other dare named characters into the story at the right place in the order.
158. Have one of your characters get smacked in the head with something large, wooden, and heavy, go into a coma for three weeks, then wake up thinking s/he is Captain Jack Sparrow (from Pirates of the Caribbean), talking, walking, and acting like him. Then have him/her wake up into their real self in the last chapter.
159. Spend at least five hundred words on the social history, etymology, and/or proper usage of the word "shmoopy."
160. Vampire watermelon.
161. A character who, with an obsessive passion, searches everywhere for The Number of the Beast, and finds it in the most obscure places (serial numbers with 666 in the middle, or a credit card where three adjacent "clumps" of numbers began with six, etc.)
162. Have a character who will only write with quill and ink
163. Have a character who is obsessed with collecting the cap liners from pop bottles to make armor for Armageddon or some such world-ending battle.
164. Have a character who will only do/read/eat things that have something to do with the number 8.
165. Include a character, major or minor, much like Hamlet. Near the beginning the ghost of his father must tell him to avenge his death, then there must be the fake-madness, ultimately culminating in lots of Shakespearean death and...yeah. Read Hamlet, really, to know more. (It can obviously be changed to take place in modern times, etc. Bonus points if you keep the line, "Oh, I am slain!") But...this must make absolute sense. The character cannot be just really weird and obsessed with Hamlet.
166. Mention this year's novel-in-progress, in the novel-in-progress
167. I double-dog dare ya: Have a character who compulsively hordes complimentary CDs (a la AOL). He can have some intended use, or not, but his dwelling must be cluttered with tall stacks of them on every available surface.*
168. I dare someone to write their novel in a style that could be easily Rocky-Horror-ized.
169. Have your main character drop pants and moon someone!
170. Have a singing snake that can only sing in rhyme to the beat of the national anthem of whatever country it's from as one of your main characters.
171. Have someone walk into a crowded public place wearing BRIGHT GREEN velvety dance pants and be proud of the fact they're wearing them. No dream sequences either
172. Have someone sing a couple lines of a Broadway show tune every time they hear the word "pretty"
173. Have someone be in a porter potty and have the porter potty be tipped over while the character is in it. (There is actually a sign in the porter potty's that say 'Do not tip when dumping'. My brother and I were quite amused).
174. Have someone say something in Latin to people who have no idea what he/she is talking about.
175. Put me in as a character (see cameos thread) and kill me off
176. I dare to take the "word association thread" and use every word that has been given so far, in chronological order, in individual sentence.
177. Have a character's line be, "Holy __! The building's gone!!!"*
178. Include a conversation involving breakfast foods. Refer to it at least once after in your novel.
179. Have random background characters throughout the novel be acting out things from the "50 things to do when you're bored" or "50 things to do in Wal-mart" kind of list... y’know, like "stuff 50 mini marshmallows up your nose and try to sneeze them out". (I'm sure I have copies of these lists somewhere... if you want them, I can try to provide)
180. Have your character amuse themselves for a few pages by running brightly colored fall leaves through a shredder. If possible, try to write a thoughtful and deep inner monologue at this point. What the character does with the leaf-confetti afterwards is up to you....
181. Have a tv display many varieties of "ESPN's X-treme.... whatever". Bowling, laundry, frisbee, dog walking, turkey basting, grocery shopping, sleeping....
182. Have a cameo appearance or five by the Crocodile Hunter guy. Preferably chasing something odd and unlikely.
183. Have someone wearing fibre-optic jewelry. Complete with battery pack.
184. Include a short scene in which your characters are conversing while perched upon something (telephone pole, streetlamp... anything that isn't usually perched upon). Don't explain why/how they're there.
185. Grant one of your characters the awareness that he/she/it is fictional. What effect this has on his/her/its personality and mental stability is up to you, but you have to logically explain how the character became aware of his/her/its fictional status. (i.e., she was meditating and came into contact with the spirit of the author, or the author made somebody take an action that was out of character, or he discovered that when he walks out of the room there isn't anything there because the author hasn't written about it yet.)
186. I dare someone to write an entire chapter in Days of our Lives format
187. Have your character having a random cheese eating contest. They should just get up, gets some blocks of cheese and eat them. At least one of these character should be lactose intolerant (happened at college
188. Have a character convinced something is real when it clearly isn't ("Oh, look at the penguins" "What penguins?" "Those penguins, over there..." "There are on penguins!" "Are you mad, of course there are!" or "What's two plus two" "Nelson" for example, both coming from my RL...)
189. Name a chapter in your novel something completely random, like "The Pastry". Either this chapter will have absolutely nothing to do with pastry, or it'll revolve completely around pastry but have nothing to do with the rest of the novel
190. Include a long passage where the main character (who by that time should have gotten into a significant amount of trouble of some sort) wonders if maybe everything that's happening is just some stupid novel written by some idiot writer who wants to get out 50,000 words in a month.
191. Have your characters hold a 1000 word conversation where everyone only speaks in questions. No cheating and having them answer something before firing back a question in the same sentence! Pure questions.
192. Make a character have a long, meaningful conversation with a cat. This has to be at least a thousand words if not more. For fun, you can also switch to the POV of the cat and have it think disdainful thoughts at the stupid human.
193. I DARE you to have some characters watch and make comments about the movie Blue Lagoon.
194. [Include] A dwarf with no beard, or a punk dwarf... shaved head and all.
195. [Include] An Elf with multiple ear piercings.
196. [Include] A rogue with a collection of pocket frogs that croak at the WORST moments possible.
197. [Include] A knight with gay twist... his war horse wears bells on its legs, his flag has a phallic symbol on it, there are butterflies or pansies painted on his armor, things along that line
198. Mention something about the dramatic Music that will heighten the tension of a scene or scare the BGs out of people in a scene, but the characters either Never hear the music or they actually hear it and Don't know where it is coming from.
199. Have your characters only speak in song-titles for an entire chapter! It doesn't matter which ones: old, new, nursery rhymes, anything!
200. Name at least ½ your character after common objects. I.E. pencil case, monitor, crisp packet, book, glass, video, DVD
201. Have a character with a odd habit of giving everything names. Preferably the main character. "She decided that the stream looked like a Sonia. Slowly she stepped into Sonia, grimacing as her socks got yet."
202. Include a character that goes into a murderous rage every time someone uses the word "like" the wrong way. You know which way I mean. (My dad is close to being this person).
203. At least one character death in your novel must have had the following things directly involved in it: a bath sponge, a fountain pen, the Backstreet Boys, and a Yorkshire Terrier. You may choose the way in which each item is involved.
204. Anyways, a dare: Have a character who speaks in palindromes, and don't explain this or have anyone comment on it. Doesn't have to be a character with very many lines, but he might talk a lot about a race car. And you might want to name him Adam ("Madam, I'm Adam"). Here's a list if you need help. Dammit, I'm mad! Oh, and if you have the character running from drunk monks and yelling "Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!" you get a million points.
205. Many novels have pages, or even whole CHAPTERS where the author does nothing but show off how much research they did on whatever subject they're writing about, and it's extremely boring. For example, the mystery novel 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' wasted the first 100 pages or so on a very, very boring account of the art and science of bell-ringing. Moby Dick is, of course a more famous example of this phenomenon. With that in mind, I DARE YOU to insert a whole chapter or more that's just blatant exhibition of all your "research". However! This research has to either be about something extremely stupid and boring, bell-ringing or worse, or else has to be blatantly wrong. Double points if it's about something insignificant AND blatantly wrong.
206. Have a character use the phrase "Hey, baby, wanna light my pyre?" as a pick-up line. (You may change that to 'want to' for word-count purposes)
207. Have a horde of wild boxes randomly enter your story at some point. Just walk/run/whatever through the scene, making odd noises. Possibly have multiple appearances
208. Have a character that will not eat anything but Lunchables
209. Send in the plot ninjas. Literally. When the story gets to a stall, put in this, "And suddenly a group of plot ninjas bursted through the door, using their ninja stars to kill the writer's block, and left." Slight variations allowed (changing "burst through door", etc.), but you must have plot ninjas killing writer's block. This cannot be a dream or something thought of by an insane person or a writer. This cannot be referenced later in the novel, and it should not confuse the characters.
210. Include a surgery scene with a nurse or doctor that screams "CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!!!" randomly throughout the operation.
211. A city struck by an epidemic of exploding fire plugs. And not just exploding as in caps flying off and water shooting all over; I mean a real trinitrotoluene style explosion, with flames and smoke and all. Boom.
212. Have a female character visit an all-boys school with her mother, without knowing that it is an all-boys school, with the intent of possibly transferring there... or vice versa
213. Have a character that suffers from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words. The phobia should be referred to by name frequently, in front of the character.
214. Have someone wear a shirt that says "Eschew obfuscation".
215. Have someone carrying a book of Rimbaud's poetry, and quote from it often.
216. Have a character in your story named Oscar Wilde (double cool points if it's a main character
217. Have a mad rush for a celebrity (double cool points if it's a celebrity from Lord of the Rings).
218. Write a whole scene of dialogue with one song. ONE
219. Have a character go off on deep philosophical discussions with him/herself on random stupid topics, such a 'is the grass truly green or is it all a matter of perception?' Double points if you can get it done during an extremely tense scene or an action sequence. Plus it will hopefully do wonders for word count.
220. Kill someone off with a carrot stick. The person cannot be choking on that stick.
221. Make a character develop a fetish for other peoples' feet for one chapter. He/she can lunge for someone's feet, pet them, whatever. There can be no references to the character's fetish in the rest of the chapters in the novel.
222. Quote from the following comics, at least three times. A very obvious quote: Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com) 8 bit Theater (http://nuklearpower.com) Calvin & Hobbs (not online) Opus (or any of the spin offs. Also not online) Any of the Johnen Vasquez works (also not online)
223. Have a chat-room scene (preferably a public chat-room) where one of the people there claims to be a Sith Lord, and randomly *zaps* people when bored.
224. Have one of your character be someone from a Greek myth. They have to fit in the setting, and they can't be gods, if they are. Like Achilles, the Marine that gets on the nerves of those under him, or Hestia, the sweet homemaker.
225. Have a cybersex scene.
226. Have some kind of apocalyptic event in your story somewhere. But here's the catch. It can't take place where most of the character are. It has to be somewhere else. Like if the story takes place in France, have it happen in China.
227. Have a major fight take place in an MMORPG
228. Have one of the character's little brothers be unable to stop talking. No one cares what he says, and he doesn't care. Extra points if he says something useful (eventually! When no one's listening!)
229. Include a pyramid made out of sugar cubes
230. Quote three Simpsons or Futurama episodes
231. Have an entire chapter of discussion between the narrator and main character.
232. Have two alternate endings for you novel.
233. Have a character who only talks about discount coupons.
234. Have six characters with the same name(first and last)
235. Include the quote "Spork the muffin! Baaaanaaaanaaaa!". Bonus if you can come up with a legitimate context to put it in, instead of just as insanity.
236. Give every character in your story a name that could be either male or female. (I.e. Sam, Kim, etc.) For extra fun, say which is which as little as possible.
237. Include a convention in your story, but a convention for a group that.... wouldn't normally have one. Could be a good thing to kill word count, too.
238. Have a minor character who only appears in your novel 3 times and each time they sneak up behind someone and scream " MONKEY FEET!" and then they disappear ( make each appearance be 5,000 or more words apart.
239. Have a scene, that is not a nightmare or daydream gone bad or etc., where your main character goes to school and then realizes they don't have on pants.
240. Have a major or minor character who thinks they are a character form a soap opera.
241. Make a character fall in love with a watermelon named Ashley, can be a male or female watermelon, and then realize that they are horrified of watermelons and smash it with a sledge hammer.
242. Make someone think they are a different animal every day or every time the character is mentioned.
243. Make someone get sent to the hospital from a critical pencil or pen stab wound and then make them vow to never use a writing instrument again
244. Make a character in your story get arrested for wearing purple socks and make it make sense.
245. Make a character have violent outbursts of the sentence " Save the tadpoles!"
246. Have a complex secret society with an unknown goal figure significantly into your story. However, at the end of the book, the purpose, core members, etc. of the society are still a secret.
247. Inspired by this thread. Start each chapter with the first line of a different book.
248. Have a character who frequently uses the word "Swick" as a synonym for good or cool. This character must either a) be completely convinced that "swick" is an actual word, and the dictionary be damned! or b) must be actively lobbying the people who make the Oxford English Dictionary for inclusion of "swick" in their next edition.
249. Have your main character find a teddy bear every time that the setting changes....there could be a teddy bear left alone on a subway...a poster of a teddy bear somewhere....a real teddy bear that they pick up and take with them. there doesn’t have to be a reason for this....but just have them see teddy bears every where that they go, and then maybe start to get freaked out about it. it could even be a hallucination. what ever.....I just think that it would be funny!! and it doesn’t even have to be a teddy bear.....any object!
250. Kill off any and all characters named 'Jamie'. This may require creating characters named Jamie - preferably male. If the character is important, double points. (Variations like 'James' are only accepted if your plot is medieval or some such
251. Include an over-steeped cup/mug of tea. Make at least three mentions of it.
252. Start a chapter with "Dude. You're bleeding." Actually, start two chapters with it. Hell, start the novel that way.
253. Have a character that collects bottles of Things That Nearly Killed Them. Depending on your genre, include: quicksand, arsenic, wolfsbane, rotten food, etc. Have the bottles be a major inconvenience at least once.
254. Quote Eddie Izzard (you are my idol if you know who he is). Specifically: "Geezy Creezy!", "I'm covered in bees!", and "I'm an executive transvestite!" Also, double points if they are actually relevant to the plot.
255. Quote 006 from Goldeneye: - "She tasted like... strawberries." - "We shared everything, absolutely everything." - "You know [James]? I was always better." Once again, cool points if the quotes are actually relevant. Oh, and you should watch this movie. The villian is absolutely spectacular, and my favorite actor to boot.
256. Have a character obsessed with Lord of the Rings so badly that she dresses like a different character in every scene that she's in. Quadruple points if they dress like a Uruk-hai one day.
257. Have someone call the other person right after they've seen The Ring. *nods* Should be fun.
258. Have a scene where two people come up with as many euphemisms for sex as humanly possible.
259. For any Lemony Snicket/A Series of Unfortunate Events fans out there: I dare you to use the Sebald Code in your novel.
260. Have one character play an instrument. ..what? Really! It's that simple!
261. Use sound effects at least three times per chapter. Never use the same one twice. (This is especially hard if you divide up chapters a lot...) Bang, swish, woosh, splat, squish, wark, whatever. Use your imagination. Bonus for using "Bamf!"
262. Have a male character who would otherwise be very unlikely to read a romance novel read the most busty, brawny harlequin romance he can find in order to impress a girl. Bonus points if you describe him embarrassedly buying the book at a bookstore
263. Have all characters' surnames come from a related set of words (i.e. cities in South Dakota, plant species, etc.)
264. Have two or more characters periodically challenge each other to eating contests
265. There must be a Radioactive Taco Shack as a restaurant in your story. Your characters must go there and be served radioactive tacos/burritos/whatever and then start to glow as an aftereffect. They could start going crazy for a short while or develop phobias, both of which allow for other dares.
266. Correctly make use of the euphemism "basil-of-the-bridges". It's in the first volume, do a word search and see if you can work out what it is.
267. Mega bonus points: Steal this line- "There is no help for it; I must crucify a man who sells conserve of pomegranate-grains lacking pepper." It has to make sense in your novel... somehow...
268. Have a character be afraid of the color yellow. Due to this, they cannot drive because of yellow lights and the lines on the road
269. Have a Mullet Festival or a Mullet Pride Expo going on in the background, or just use it as a setting in one of your chapters. Guys selling shirts like "we love mullets" and "go MacGuyver."
270. NEVER use the word "wacky."
271. Every now and then insert a trio of flesh-eating squirrels.
272. Have one of your characters often go off on tangents about saving the whales.
273. Have one of your characters' fears be the 9 of Clubs (card). Whenever he or she sees this card, they feel a growing sense of taboo. It signals to them that something bad is coming...Ooooooh
274. I will forever love the person who makes use of this: A restaurant, infamous for it's famous mad steak knife which has a will of its own and kills anyone who insults the steak or the silverware or sometimes, even the restaurant itself.
275. Use the word floccinaucinihilipilification at some point in your nano. The definition is : noun. Rare. The estimation of something as valueless (encountered mainly as an example of one of the longest words in the English language)
276. Base a character off Christopher Walken. Brownie points if you can get that character to jump on a desk and dance, or fly down stairs (but don't make it silly--hopefully it'll make sense).
277. Use giant man-eating ninja cabbages in your novel. They can be giant man-eating lesbian ninja cabbages, if you want, too
278. Here's a super-dee-duper hard dare for anyone who's game. *evil grin* Base a large part of your novel (can be part of a chapter, several chapters, the whole novel, doesn't matter) on the lyrics to "Virtual Star Embryology" by J.A. Seazer: Ancient times, perfect, solitude in the desert / Air, atoms, the planet of causality / Yes, a native child / Conception / The embryo of philosophy / Egg, perfect, the origin in the nest / A stamen, a pistil, one seed / Yes, a native child / Growth / The child of philosophy / And Lunar Heaven, Mercurial Heaven, Venusian Heaven / Solar Heaven, Martian Heaven, Jovian Heaven / Saturnian Heaven, Sidereal Heaven, Motive Heaven / Further circular infinity without end / One organic system / One perpetual motion device / Ah, it is an empty movement / That is an empty movement. It is.
279. Use the line: "I still have dreams... of him getting crushed by an exercise machine over and over." When one of your characters is talking about a dearly departed.
280. I Dare your character who lives with their parents, to receive a letter from Social Security announcing the death of their mother, including paperwork to fill out to begin receiving her benefits -- with mom reading said letter over their shoulder and laughing hysterically at being thusly informed that she is dead. (plot tangent: character has to write Social Security back, informing them that mom is alive...)
281. Have at least one character (major or minor) be a swimmer, and mention them smelling like chlorine
282. Have a character read the book Grendel and hate it.
283. Have a juggler appear somewhere in the story, and spend at least a paragraph on them
284. Ask someone to lend you a random CD (as in you won't know what CD they're going to give you until it's actually in your hands), then base 500 words of your novel off of the lyrics of the third track on that CD. (Yeah, I know, this is sort of like the radio dare, but a CD usually has the lyrics to the songs in the little CD booklet, so you can reference it while you write.) Have one of your characters randomly start singing that song throughout the book. Hella good for adding random extra words!
285. Write a sentence in your novel. Take the sentence to the Google language tools page and translate it from English to French, then French to English, English to Portuguese, Portuguese to English, and so on, in and out of a few languages. Use the result as your next sentence.
286. Spend at least 1000 words debating Batman and Robin's sexuality.
287. The Skywalker Dare version two (although it's probably been done) - after your character discovers that his/her love interest is a sibling, he/she must discover that the villain is their father. And then have many highly slashy scenes involving face-caressing and helmet-removing. Or you could cancel that last bit.
288. Have a character explain the Batman/Robins canon, including anecdotes about each reincarnation (Jason, Tim) with vivid hand gestures.
289. Have a character walk up to people on the street and say "Look at my butt! Look at it! Aint it great?"
290. Give one of your character explosive diarrhoea
291. Have someone use the line "Will you let me bang my love spuds up against your dirt box?"
292. Have someone get a tin of salmon as a gift.
293. Have someone make a hole in his mattress, and get stuck in it (you know, his thingy)
294. Have a small dog fall on someone's head.
295. Have someone say, "What do you mean 'it was like that when you found it'?"
296. Have someone fart during a sex scene.
297. Have a troup of cubscouts march through your stories, who will try to sell some of your characters lottery tickets to raise funds for their annual camp.
298. At some point in your novel, a character has to fix something by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Preferably with some sort of sonic screwdriver.
299. Have a character eat lunch out somewhere and have their fork explode.
300. Grignr (the of The Eye of Argon fame) must make a cameo somewhere. Also, include a bollock-kicking sequence that goes on longer than the one from Argon. You know the one I'm talking about: if not, just Google "The Eye of Argon", do a search for "testicles" and read on.
301. Have character A read regularly a book of W. B. Yeats's poems in his/her toilet. Have character B, who doesn't know A well at this point, notice the book. Write him/her make conclusions about A based on the toilet-reading. Make these conclusions affect the development of the relationship between these two characters until, say, 25k. Then make A get to hear about these conclusions. And they have to start to build their relationship again from a scratch. These two must not be romantically involved.
302. Have one of your main characters eating every time they are in a scene.
303. Use this sentence: "The girls he grew up with often got excited over lip gloss, purchasing little tubes by the dozen in a variety of fruit flavors."
304. Open your email inbox, or the junk folder if filters are set up. Name a character after one of (or a combination of) the spoofed names that appear in the headings.
305. You must have a character say, "How now brown cow?". Jolly Ranchers if you use it for the first line!
306. Have a character continually reference obscure movies. Bonus points if they're obscure foreign films* (Ha! I was planning on doing this *anyway!*)
307. Kill a character's pet
308. Have a dwarf that hates caves.
309. Have an elf that is scared of the dark.
310. Have a witch with a wart on her nose but who is otherwise quite attractive.
311. Use the following quote: "Six years later, the memory of stale cheese crackers continued to haunt her." It must relate to the plot in some way--you can't just have a character randomly say it or read it or see it in a dream sequence.
312. Continually make reference to songs stuck in your main character's head. Have them somehow related to that bit of the plot.
313. Have a character that only refers to him- or herself in the third person. Bonus if you can work in a conversation between two other characters trying to figure out why he/she does this.
314. Have a male character that obsessively reads engagement / wedding announcements in a newspaper that is not from either (a) the city/town he lives in or (b) the city/town where he grew up. Make this relevant to your plot and reference it often.
315. Write a scene in which your main character does a taste test of Coke vs. Pepsi.
316. Have a character who frequently starts his or her sentences with "Well, Roger says / said..." Do not have a character in your story named Roger.
317. Have a pet in your story with multiple personalities
318. Have two major characters betting a sizable amount of money on an event not normally associated with wagers (i.e. The Grammys, a spelling bee).
319. Write a chapter where your female lead runs into every man she's ever had sex with. Bonus if you can make this seems completely natural.
320. Have a character who is stalked by someone who sends daily postcards featuring chimpanzees. Bonus points if the character has absolutely no idea who's sending them. Extra bonus points if this has absolutely nothing to do with your plot, but you work in a mention in every chapter.
321. Have one of your characters just randomly swap age groups (eg, if they are an adult, have them suddenly turn into a small child).
322. Include a boy named Chato who appears once in awhile and asks one of your main chracters if he can borrow a shirt.
323. Include Richie Rich
324. A some point in your story, the main character looks up towards the heavens, asking the gods for mercy. Hagrid is flying through the sky.
325. Make all of your characters believable, no matter how fantastic their natures, to make equal sympathies lie with the protagonists and antagonists so that neither are considered better than the other, to use absolutely no references to past or present popular media if your book is set in the real world but still make it seem just like the real world, to write a character contrary to your nature and beliefs and yet cast them in a positive light, and to make use of absurd elements and yet make your mundane elements far more noticeable and interesting. (If only, eh?)
326. Have a character obsessed with forensic science. Loves it, is great at it...and faints at the sight of blood and is allergic to fingerprint powder.
327. Include a rubber chicken that honks NOT WHEN SQUEEZED, but upon being refilled with air. Bonus points if it's in a school library where the librarian is named Theresa and her homeroom is constantly stealing the chicken and honking it out the window. No, that's not me and my friends...
328. Have a character who always contradicts him/herself, and is always caught, but just doesn't care.
329. Use the following Law & Order quote: "What's the difference between killing and murder?" "Twenty-five to life?"*
330. Use the novelist character from the last Law and Order. His name was Jeremy, I think. The episode began with him trying to work on his novel, but unable to because the guy in the next apartment had his music blaring. He finally snapped, stomped over there, and found the guy dead. He was really rude to the cops when they showed up; his girlfriend/wife explained that he was trying to work on a novel and was really frustrated. Made me think of NaNoWriMo. (Me, too, totally.)
331. Have a parakeet that mimics the phone's ring precisely. Have it lead to the characters continually picking up the phone and wondering why no one's there. Bonus points if the parakeet is only mentioned in those circumstances.
332. Have your characters go to the bathroom as they normally should. I.E. "Can I use your restroom before I leave?" Have it have nothing to do with the plot.
333. Have a character explain the theories of parallel universes for no reason. Bonus points if it's during a critical situation. Doubled bonus points if he/she includes all four levels
334. Use the word "hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian" in a sentence effectively at least twice throughout the novel
335. Have someone enter the scene with a gun and a jar and demand "Give me your soul!" Bonus points if they then offer a ribbon color of choice for the jar.
336. Have someone in your story jump up and down on their bed wearing their PJs/underwear singing rock songs badly on purpose. Without any apparent reason.
337. Have all the streets named after cigarettes and/or cigars. Variation you can include beers/wines.
338. Have your MC speak only in bad puns and/or horrible cliches for the duration of an entire conversation (say, around 500 - 750 words or so). The conversation should be important to the plot in some way.
339. Have a character that believes s/he was abducted by aliens. Panic ensues each time they see an object that slightly resembles the "probe" used on them in the ship. Bonus points if you make it a main character. Super double bonus points if the actual abduction was nothing more than a prank by the character's friends.
340. Have a character that wears a chain mail bikini. Bonus points if said bikini protects that character better than the pope's bubble car.
341. Name the MC's horse Silver, and be sure to frequently have the MC shout "Hi-ho Silver, away!" Bonus points for having a character that doesn't have a horse do this and then "gallop" around the room for no apparent reason.
342. Include a minor character named Mr. Ian Woon
343. [Have] One character discovers a 'rip in time' under their bed, and every so often something from the past, future or (for the really adventurous) a parallel universe comes flying out at the most inopportune moments
344. Have singalongs around a campfire. You must use these songs in the singalong - 'Harder To Breathe' by Maroon 5, 'Skull Tattoo' by Eagle Eye Cherry, 'Bitch' by Meredith Brooks, 'Americana' by The Offspring. And where it applies, leave the swearing in.
345. Talking about oneself in the third person is too easy. Have your self-absorbed character talk about himself in the second person. Bonus points: Have this character, a third-person-speaker, and a 'normal' person meet at a party. Massive confusion results, probably ending in a fistfight.
346. Have a male character use the following line (whether it be a pick up line or not): "There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours."
347. I dare you to not accept any dares, then explain in the novel how you're getting around doing so when technically you've already accepted mine...no word limit, just wanna see if you can talk yourself out of a box...
348. Have a character (doesn't matter how minor) that will only do something if you dare them. Such as: "Pass me the salt?" Silence. He sighed and said, "I dare you to pass me the salt." or "Oh, Great One! Please give us the knowledge we require!" Silence. He sighed and said, "Oh, Great One! I dare you to give us...."
349. Have a character who is obsessed with “the flying cats”. Actually include said cats near the end of your novel.
350. Have characters go to a Halloween party where someone is dressed as the Emperor from “The emperor’s new clothes”
351. For fellow fantasy folk out there, have a magician whose spells are invariably accompanied by the production of either a multitude of flowers (cut or growing from the ground, whichever) or a smell which would otherwise be notably out of character for the character to have around him or her (EG brawny sorcerer whose lightning spell of destruction is accompanied by the soft scent of lavender)
352. Randomly, every 5,000 words or so, go off on a 1,000 word synopsis of any episode of any TV show. It could be relevant or not, but it has to happen, and the 1,000 words don't count towards the 'every 5,000 words'.
353. Have one of your characters openly notice that their story is following a tired plot line and call a halt to it. For instance, if you are writing a horror novel, you could have your victim start to run *up* the stairs and stop, because everyone knows that is a no-no when monsters are after you.
354. Have a character that wears a twenty-foot long scarf at all times. Clarification: The scarf wearer must not: ever take it off for any reason, save washing and sleeping. Be from Gallifrey. Be named 'Tom Baker'. Know what Doctor Who is. It is also requested that they trip over the scarf at least once.
355. Include a bar with a separate menu for the most disgusting drinks ever devised. Dog turd and tonic, Pig fat and Parsley, so on and so forth. Double points if this menu causes the bar to gain in popularity, quadruple if the main character actually tries one.
356. Start every chapter with a statement that appears totally random at first, but actually finds a way to bridge into the actual plot line for the chapter. I'm doing this myself, and in fact the book will start with the sentence.
357. Have a character get stuck in a high tree early in the novel. The main character(s) promise to go get help, but get sidetracked by something more important, and so the person is left in the tree. Every 5,000 words or so, you must check back in on the guy stuck in the tree in a sort of "Meanwhile, back in the tree..." fashion and write 500 words about how he/she is doing. You have the choice to either to kill this character at the end of the novel or leave him/her sitting there forever and ever and ever and ever...
358. Have a character speak entirely in MegaHAL quotes.
359. Include a random fantasy plot in your novel - as a chapter, a subplot, or even the whole thing. Bonus points for using the first one that comes up.
360. Have a character who refuses to wear anything but purple
361. Have a character who has a recurring dream about potatoes (in some way or another) and tells his/her friend about it, who attempts to analyze it.
362. Have a male character dating a ditz who thinks that, since we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and gain weight, if she reversed the meal order, she would lose weight. So every time he asks her out to dinner, they have to go to Denny's because that is the only place she can get breakfast in the evening.
363. Have a scene in which cheerleaders (male and female or just female) are practicing in the distance. As the main characters get closer, it should become apparent that the cheerleaders are yelling "Look! Look! Look at my crotch!"
364. Mention Torgo and his theme song. Bonus if Torgo makes multiple appearances in the novel, accompanied by his haunting theme each time.
365. Include the line "It is BALLOON!" in dialogue somewhere
366. Make frequent references to someone's "hinder" or "area." Also include a reference to a "buffalo shot."
367. Refer to KLACK skin mittens, taco mincemeat relish parfait served in a tulip glass, Polynesian cheese devils, or crust puppies. Having a character eating any of the above is worth extra.
368. Include Mr. B Natural as a main or supporting character.
369. Have a character with a fascination for either Richard Basehart, Kim Catrall, Bea Arthur, Estelle Winwood, or the Creepy Girl.
370. Have a character sing the Sandy Frank song, or at least the line "Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Likes to crap in his hand!"
371. Have a character with a pet lemur named Joey.
372. Have your main character walking a small dog when suddenly a very large dog runs toward them. Watching across the street are several neighbors who say "Look, that pitbull's attacking that guy/girl. Quick, get the video camera"
373. Include a character named Mark the Red, who always follows the main characters around but never says or does anything other than standing around and going wherever he is pushed (if you must know why click here)
374. Actually use an outline from this site. You may use it as a subplot, or a story-within-a-story, but extra points if it's your main plot
375. Have someone who constantly says things like "Duuude!!", "Whoah.", and "Excellent!". Have the same person do a bit of air guitar after they say it also. (Seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, anyone?)
376. Have a society devoted to making indestructible goldfish bowls.
377. Have this somewhere in there...By a friend...It may have been posted already. "Oh, but I was DDRing the BIOS, and the SCSI jammer just blew. So I thought I would take a shot at flaming the registry, but that just turned my word files into net speak! It'll take me a couple of days before I can go out and get a new ethernet adapter... could you just wait until then?". Doesn't have to actually make sense in any context, but bonus marks if it fits.
378. Have a couple of geeks playing D&D. However, if one dies or something, the geek playing that character dies. Eventually, all but one die.
379. Have a dramatic (optional) point in the story where a character says "..and so may you ALL!" while making some sort of dramatic motion, finger pointing, spitting, etc. Then (also optional!) have someone else break the mood by saying "Sure thing, Grendel."
380. Have at least 2 of your characters get into a debate about "Which is better, pizza or sex?" List reasons, come to a conclusion, make it an on running theme, whatever!
381. An entire conversation based around arguing about where to eat, (e.g. "Where do you want to eat?" "I don't care, you pick" "No.. you."
382. Sword fight with those plastic PVC pipes (actually works very well...)
383. Group of people who have formed an on-shore pirate ship. complete with Captain, Navigator, Assain, Flogger, Ship Wench, Cook, etc.
384. Have a character named Margaret, with the nickname, given to her by her parents at an early age, of "Miggles." A major catchphrase of hers, esp. when introducing herself, has to be, in a very cheerful bouncy voice, "I hate my life!"
385. Have a team of superheroes with the following powers: One must be able to "hold a flaming bag of garlic bread," and the other has to be able to "throw stuff kind of hard, and if that doesn't work, ram them in the nuts."
386. Have a character refer to a meal with "Let's see what crawled out of the bunghole" even if your novel has nothing to do with pirates or sailing vessels (a bung is a barrel or cask in which food is stored).
387. Have one of your main characters have an unusually small pet named Mr Jingles arcana
388. Make analogies between events in your plot/character's lives or days and large historical events (I.E. [American] Washington crossing the Delaware) at least 2 times in every chapter. arcana
389. Use the song "I touch myself" in a serious conversation between characters about self-sexuality or some such topic.
390. No novel is complete without a good bit of ritual sacrifice. So sacrifice something. A person, a chicken, a donkey, an earthworm, a cricket bat, a photograph of a wide-screen television set, Rupert Murdoch, anything.
391. At some point in your novel, it must rain frogs. Yes, I mean frogs start falling from the sky. For no apparent reason. This is important: never explain why it is raining frogs. Make it have absolutely no connection to the plot line up to this point. Your characters may take the amphibian precipitation matter-of-factly, or they may be bewildered, but don't offer any explanation for it.
392. Write about Sister Magnum Mary, undercover nun, in a novel. But not a mystery or adventure novel.
393. Have all your chapter titles be completely random and not relating to the plot whatsoever. Example - Chapter IV: Where the sky turns purple and goldfish establish a monarchy in Russia where they will rule from castles built of jellybeans. They can be as long as you want - they do count in the final word count, you know.
394. Include a character who constantly handcuffs himself/herself to objects. Chairs, telephone poles, other people, the possibilities are endless.
395. Make a character say "In the end, I was not the cabbage. The cabbage is in all of us." Make this make sense. Bonus points if you can explain it.
396. Have a girl yell at another girl, "You got salt in my ear, you WHORE!"
397. Extra points if you have this in between a conversation about how "Even though we share a room this year and have all our classes together, we always get along really well." (like in REAL LIFE)
398. There's a stranded guy on a deserted island. Every once in a while, come back to him, while he breaks his method of getting off the island and has to start over. Make them progressively more and more complicated. His last one, probably a teleporter, works, but sends him to a cabbage farm in Siberia. Make sure it's all built out of typical tropical island stuff, like sticks, palm leaves, and coconuts. Make sure he doesn't have anything to do with the plot.
399. Include all the plagues of Egypt in your novel. Bonus points for quoting this thread and/or mentioning Bush, and see if anybody gets it. Sub-dare: If you do include them all, DON'T refer to them as the seven plagues. Just have them all happen. Don't have people notice, and don't comment on it as the author.
400. Have a closet that a minor character guards with his/her life and terrified of whatever is in the closet. however, don't ever let anyone go in the closet or find out what is in the closet.
401. Have a character named Mrs. Bea Ess. This was my great-aunt's real name and she had a real sense of humor about it.
402. Have two characters, who whenever they see or talk to each other fit in a conversation about having to shave. A friend of mine and I have done this for years, we still fit it into almost every conversation we've ever had, even in emails. Don't ask me why, we just do. (examples: "Yeah, my armpit hair is almost long enough to braid..." or "I wanna shave, but I don't want to shower today.")
403. Have a surgery scene where the patient is still awake and the doctor insists upon having a conversation with them while they operate, but the patient is all worried about the surgery and the doctor is talking about something totally unrelated and/or unimportant like his golf game or the fact that he once fell asleep doing a surgery. this actually happened to me.
404. Have an assassin type character that gets caught and tries to commit suicide with a potato. whether they live or die is up to you.
405. Love Eddie Izzard, so have a character that on a regular basis blurts out 'Cake or Death!' Eventually, let it annoy another character to the point where they kill the "Cake or Death blurting character" starlighter007
406. Have all or most of your minor character's named after popular cities. Make sure no one in the story thinks they are odd names. (examples: Seattle, Eugene, Albany, etc.)
407. Throw in the word 'zesty' every 1000 words or so.
408. Oh, there is a dog on tv that always says this. it cracks me up to no end. try to work it so that your characters use it on a regular basis whenever someone is talking about how good something is, have the other character ask: "oh yeah? Is it good enough to poop on?" And always have the response be: "Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely good enough to poop on." (sorry, if it's childish, but just seems so damn funny when used in reality that I would love to hear use of it in a story)
409. Have two characters as best friends. They seem completely insane on the outside, but they really have very relevant reasons for everything they say/do. Invent sayings or phrases for your characters to use, and attach a past event to it. For example, my friend and I are much like this. We often spew out random phrases such as "COSTCO!" and "I'm going to write a letter... TO THE POPE!" and "Lactose Intolerant!"
410. Have a character refer to someone else's private part(s) as "My Precious..." The hapless other person MUST be a complete stranger.
411. Write about someone who regards NaNoWriMo as a new philosophy/way of life/cult/religion. Like "You must follow the Way of the NaNo...I am the NaNo Master...NANO NANO!"
412. Go and read Oh My Gods! Once done, include references to: REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI! / Fundie is taking a holiday. He'd very much like to appear in a book someday, and not the Bible, either. / Stuck for a religion? FISH! / Have the Pope make a http://www.ohmygods.timerift.net/strips/2002/10/20.php joke. / The invisible fairies want someone else to bother. / I SMOTE THIS STORY! / That poking stick could be a dangerous weapon in the wrong person's hands.
413. Use all (or at least most) of the movie quotes in the Movie Quote Tag thread in your novel. You can even have just one character say all of them if you want
414. Include a devil-bunny in your novel. It doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter what it's doing, it doesn't matter if it's integral to the plot. Bonus points if it manages to eat a person's toes. Extra Bonus points if it's named "Fuzzy".
415. Have your antagonist and your protagonist eat only fluffy pink socks. Bonus points if, when they finally meet, they have a thorough discussion on the finer points of Fluffy Pink Sock Cooking while engaging themselves in a fierce duel.
416. Have a cat get stuck in the ventilation system of a large building/house. Characters spend several hours trying to figure out what those banging noises are, then have to conduct a complicated rescue mission to save said cat. Having it spontaneously combust at the end like in that other dare is entirely optional.
417. Have your character diving down the road on a nice day, with the car windows open. No other car is beside him/her, and no one is seen on the side of the road. But suddenly, and inexplicably, an object flies into the car from the passenger side, and beans him/her (doesn't matter where). Have at least 300 words on the subject, including what goes through the driver's mind, and such. Have the character not find it, until later, and have the object be a red jawbreaker. The mystery is never solved. And never mentioned again in the story.
418. I dare you to have a character use outdated slang annoyingly often (at least ten times). Eg: Neato, groovy, square, cat's meow. Have them be at least a few lines apart...no fair sticking ten of them in one sentence.
419. Include a character that thinks he's a chair. Have him think no one likes him because no one will sit on him. Then, have him try different things to try to make people like him and sit on him(painting himself, wearing leather, stitching leather onto himself, etc...). Whether or not he does something that kills him is up to you.
420. One of your characters (semi-major) has to be constantly harassed by balloons. beaten, tortured, whatever. the balloons have to be inflated, of course, preferably with helium.
421. Have a character who speaks in verse. Specifically with an ABAABCD rhyme structure. Extra brownie points if the character also speaks their lines to be: 6 syllables, 6 syllables, 5 syllables, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, 4 syllables. So you will have the character speaking: 6A 6B 5A 5A 7B 5C 4D.
422. Have a character who speaks backwards, whether the words are in reverse order or spoken as though spelled backward or both. And the other characters have to not think anything of it, except for the character's mother. But everyone else just thinks she's crazy.
423. Mention a purple mushroom cloud at any point in the story.
424. Have a character say 'You're goin' down. Down like /Florida/. And this time there ain't gonna be no recount.' *
425. Today, I randomly wandered into the dining room, and found that each of the chairs had a single, tiny, baby-sized sweater draped over it. I have NO idea why. So I dare you to have this happen in your novel, and come up with a logical explanation as to what this could mean.
426. I also dare you to have a character who never uses the word "cool" (or whatever variant) and instead refers to things as "nifty". Because nifty is the niftiest word ever.
427. Dare: "The clocks are attacking me!"
428. Include the following. 54 cats. 8 of which go by the name of Chatsworthy. All must be at least partially black. A girl who says 'Hello cow' the every one/thing she meets. This ends up getting her into trouble. A squirrel who become addicted to coke/Pepsi/lemonade. The following quotes. "KFC" "KFLee" "Candles candles candles" "Lee Lee Lee" "Why are there 100 birds in my room" "well actually there’s only 99. One took a sip of your 'orange juice' and flew into the fan"
429. Upon receiving bad news, have character X smash their cell phone in their clenched fist
430. Have character B stop in the middle of a serious conversation and say 'Hang on, I have to feed my pocket pet.
431. Have someone use body lotion in a completely non-perverted way
432. Have someone, every time they try to call out, dial a wrong number
433. Work in the line 'Shit, I got blasted."
434. Work in the line: "Wow! I've been looking everywhere for this video!"
435. Your novel must feature cheeses in the shape of people's heads
436. And to add to the last dare: And have a scene where someone is playing chess.. on a board of cheese.
437. The main character is about to duke it out with the antagonist at the side of a highway/road/street/path, both ready to do almost anything to defeat the other. They are about to charge when suddenly... a family of ducks walks between the two of them, blocking their means of getting at each other. Whenever they try to get past the ducks, they get bitten. So they're stuck. And it's a loooong line of ducks...
438. Write 100 words. In Iambic Pentameter. With the ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme(Like Shakespeare's sonnets)
439. Write 150 words. In Dactylic Hexameter. This doesn't require a rhyme scheme. (Check out a verse translation of the Aeneid of Vergil for ideas)
440. Have some characters find a very tiny pair of pants in their sofa, and spent a lot of time speculating as to what they are and where they came from. However, none of the characters should ever discuss that they might just be pants for/from a doll.
441. Have an Evil Overlord in your novel. Use items from the list, either with the Overlord successfully avoiding them, or doing them.
442. Have every chapter in your novel titled with an Anagram for NaNoWriMo. For extra bonus points, have your novel titled that way. In either case, the title should be relevant.
443. Have one of your main characters refer to this one book he or she has read every time he speaks word nerd
444. Have two or more characters discuss Extra Virgin Olive Oil in a sexual context, and in the conversation one of them does not understand the innuendos and is truly trying to convince the other(s) of the superiority of Extra Virgin Olive Oil over all other oils.
445. Have someone say about someone of the opposite sex, without any sexual meaning, "I'm not spending $20 for ONE NIGHT!" and have everyone laugh and make fun of him...
446. Every time your character picks up something electronic or tries to use it, the thing suddenly breaks or runs out of batteries. The other characters hold a seance to rid the character of this evil electronic-hating spirit.
447. At least once a chapter, have one of the main characters be called by someone who just breathes into the phone heavily for several seconds, then hangs up. OPTIONAL: Have the last two lines of the novel be along the lines of: "Geez! What is this? You've been calling me every day for two weeks! Who the hell are you?!" "My name? My name is..." THE END
448. Include "littul kittons," specially bred homicidally insane minks, in your stories. Ten extra points if you can fit in "Mother Hitton." A million extra points if you know what the heck I'm alluding to.
449. Make an important character randomly dress the drag and do the hula in the middle of a sad or important scene XD
450. Subscribe to one or more word-of-the-day lists (http://www.dictionary.com and http://www.m-w.com both offer them). Use each Word of the Day in that day's writing.
451. And I Dare you to each day, use Merriam Webster's (http://www.m-w.com) "Example Sentence" (click 'Word of the Day') in your day's writing.
452. Begin each chapter with a quote from one of the following: -Lines from poems by Hillaire Belloc {read} -Lines from poems by Rumi {read} -Lines from poems by Galway Kinnell {read} -Lines from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats {read}
453. Choose one of the following methods of titling your chapters: -Titles of Shakespeare plays -Cards from a deck of playing cards or tarot cards (i.e. Ace of Spades or Seven of Cups or The Hermit) -Bones in the human body (i.e. Clavicle, Ulna, Radius. Bonus points if you use Coccyx) -Tube stops on the London Underground {ref} -Clues from a crossword puzzle (Bonus points for use of clues from a single crossword puzzle)
454. Choose one of the following to include in every chapter: -Lines from songs by either Elton John or David Bowie -The closing price for the NASDAQ on the day you are writing (or the previous day, if the market isn't closed yet). Just use the number, in whatever context you like. Context can vary from chapter to chapter. -A reference to an urban myth -Someone defying superstitions - walking under ladders, breaking mirrors, etc. Your choice if he or she has to suffer the consequences of doing so.
455. I call this the Knights of Ni dare: have a character than cringes and covers their ears every time they hear someone utter the word "it".
456. Have a character who is super irritating by repeatedly, excitedly interrupting others at inconvenient moments with "oh, that reminds me of when I was a child! I . . . (and then s/he tells a long story--may be interesting or boring, but is super irritating to the others). And then you can use ALL your own childhood experiences so conveniently--tragic, funny, or royally embarrassing
457. Have a character (major or minor, doesn't matter) mention NaNoWriMo at least three times in different situations, and have him/her talk about how addictive these boards are
458. The Bilbo Skywalker dare: At the final confrontation between the hero and the villain, have the villain proclaim that he is, in fact, the hero's first and second cousin, twice removed either way.
459. Work in MC Hammer as a character, somehow (extra points for multiple novelty rappers from the early 90's, such as Vanilla Ice, Sir Mix a Lot)
460. Have a very important project/assignment break (i.e. science project, proposal, etc.) and fix it with duct tape.
461. Have Bert and Ernie appear has characters (major or minor) in your novel.
462. Have your characters competing and living in the Big Brother house
463. Write at least one chapter of your book as if you were the host of a talk show and your characters are the guests.
464. Get any and/or all characters of the A-Team as cameos.
465. Include a character who is constantly reminded of episodes of The Simpsons when others are talking. They must voice their sudden recollection to everyone around them, even if it means changing the subject at hand or interrupting others. "You know, that reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons when..."
466. Books these days need more rabbits in them! Like Watership Down! So, I dare someone to put a Warren (large group) or rabbits in their story. Maybe even 50,000 of them!
467. Have any character compliment the decor of another's home/workplace. s/he then goes on a long and enthusiastic rant about how s/he went on the show "trading spaces". Do not SAY "trading spaces", but rather detail the entire process, from applying to be on the show, to meeting the designers, trading keys with a neighbor, disagreeing with the designers, all the way to finally seeing the finished room.
468. Make a character who looks completely different every time he or she walks in the room. Even if they just left a minute ago. And I mean completely different.
469. Have a character who refuses to touch the floor. Make alternate ways for them to get around, e.g., fences, furniture, people's backs.... If the character does touch the ground, make them get very upset.
470. Have a character who is generally a nice guy, yet for various reasons, is wanted dead by everyone.
471. Have a character get very emotional about duct tape.
472. Get in a long, serious discussion about the relationship between wolves and domestic dogs.
473. Have one character firmly believe that a domestic cat is a Puma.
474. Make a character randomly throw Pokemon balls at other characters and catch them.
475. Make at least 6 references to A) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy B) Anything from this website www.rathergood.com C) Shades of hair dye. (e.g., Plum Oasis, but don't use it in the context of hair dye)
476. Refer to every single book you've read in the past year at least once (not necessarily by name--you can quote it, or explain its plot--in fact it's cooler if you allude to it but omit the name).
477. Make as many fish references as humanly possible. Also, if you need to use any numbers (ages, street numbers, etc), use forty-two (which is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything according to Douglas Adams, by the by). In fact, just go ahead and make as many Douglas Adams references as you can!
478. Have sports announcers in your novel - they can be announcing a game or nothing at all - bonus points for including random statistics and using the incredibly singular patter that announcers have. rivki8699
479. Use quotes from a Corky and the Juice Pig song. Bonus points for using lyrics from Pandas, Pants, Eskimo and Remember or having the lyrics make sense. Lyrics Warning - many of these lyrics are offensive or inappropriate for children - only click on that link if you are over 18. Please keep in mind - this is a humor band and it's all parody.
480. Have two or more of your characters play a game of “dozens” - also known as “yo mama so fat.” Alternate versions appropriate to specific genres are also acceptable, e.g.: Yo dragon so ugly (fantasy) Yo laser so weak (sci-fi) Yo demon so stupid (horror) Yo heaving bosom so flat (romance) Yo tentacles so small (never mind)
481. Include a character whose name means something ridiculous in a foreign language. Only one other person in the book knows this language. S/he will start laughing hysterically when introduced to the other person. This incident should not be explained.
482. Give either your novel or chapter a title which strongly implies that you have taken up one of the other dares mentioned here, but do not use the dare in any other way. Example: “Day of the Tentacles.”*
483. Have a character with synesthesia! 1.2 The word synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blending whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather than being an image in the mind's eye. I currently estimate that ½5,000 individuals is born to a world where one sensation involuntarily conjures up others, sometimes all five clashing together (Cytowic, 1989, 1993). http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
484. [Include] A little man who only says "dorf."
485. Have one of your characters talk like Mojo Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls. The evil purple-brain-hat monkey from that Cartoon Network cartoon about three superhero triplets. The one who repeats and says everything over and over again; sometimes he rephrases but basically what he's saying is the same thing. The same idea is being conveyed no matter what he's saying. He's trying to tell you the same thing, just in different ways. He makes it all different, to make it interesting. He wants his speech to be unique, so it will stand out. He wants to make it so that he can add more words. He wants to speak more about the subject, especially since you are supposed to write 50k for NaNoWriMo. You have to write a 50k novel for NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, which is about writing a 50k novel during the month of November, the 11th month. And you need 50k worth of words, you need that many to win, to be successful, to rule the world. And a character like Mojo Jojo, the monkey who turned out to be the Powerpuff Girls' father in a way, not really technically, but somehow he is, through a plot twist, which is also good for NaNoWrimo, will make it good for NaNoWriMo...
486. Have a character who is addicted to smelling markers - not the really big ones (I think they're called magnums), but the ones for kids that never smell like they're supposed to.
487. Have a character who is obsessed with Star Trek and whose dialogue consists of nothing but Star Trek quotes. Extra fifty points if he's a somewhat important character.
488. Have a character totally convinced that Microsoft is planning to take over the world using the paperclip shaped Office Assistant. S/he will try convincing others of the scheme throughout the novel. Bonus points if s/he's right about it. (And we all know s/he is. Double bonus points if this is important to the plot in any way.
489. I dare you to have at least one passage of dialogue in your novel where everything the characters say has a double connotation. IE: "I don't do it enough." Etc...I'm sure your imagination will serve you well. Bonus points if you leave what they're talking about ambiguous.
490. Have a character who is dark and sinister looking; dresses in black, wears chains and spikes and leather, has a deep, slow, voice... you know, typical Goth. Then have all the other characters refer to him as "Happy Sparkle Unicorn Rainbow Puffy Cloud Pants" or something similar. Your choice as the whether the character really is sinister. Also your choice as to whether the character is irritated by his "nickname".
491. Snub your main character for at least a chapter (or equivalent) by, say, ignoring him/her when counting people in the room (IE if there are three people present write as if there were two) and have other characters either ignore or brutally disprove anything he/she says
492. Include a character named Captain Obvious (your choice as to whether this is a superhero, someone who dresses up like one, a military officer...) who shows up and explains the plot at least five times. This can be completely random or completely integrated into your plot.
493. Have a certain item - a hat, for example - that causes people who are wearing it or holding it to have a certain opinion or trait - conservatism, liberalism, bursting into song, whatever. Don't explain it or let your characters figure it out - just have it show up several times and do its work.
494. Somehow work in the address of every place you have ever lived. If you lived in 4 dorms in college that counts as four separate addresses.
495. I dare you to name a character Crista Galli or Glen O'Humeral. (Sounds like I've got a one track mind - anatomy!)
496. Name all of your chapters after headlines from The Onion. The titles could directly relate to the content of the chapter, or they could be completely off by a million miles, it doesn't matter. Just use them! For example, you could have Chapter 5: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs: 'Oh, Shit,' Says Humanity, Chapter 9: Hostel-Dwelling Swede Getting Laid Big-Time or Chapter 13: Schwarzenegger Elected First Horseman Of The Apocalypse.
497. Have one character (minor, major, doesn't matter) answer a serious question by shouting "GREYHOUNDS!" Do not have them then answer the question, or elaborate in any way.
498. Have a random background character running around yelling "He cannot see man! He cannot see!" at the top of his or her lungs.
499. Name all the important buildings in your novel after characters from TV shows, such as 'The B.A. Barracus Memorial Hall'. Bonus points for the 'Joey Tribbiani Psyche Ward'.
500. Have one character wear odd socks for the duration of the novel, if time passes, have them in different colored odd socks, but always mismatched. Draw attention to it at least three times, but it should have no bearing on plot, and never be explained.
501. Your main character is knocked over by an agitated man wearing only a bath-towel and a bowler hat. This man is never seen again.
502. For extra bonus points: Have your characters in a car when they pass a man hitchhiking at the side of a road, with a small white fridge. They can debate him if they wish, but they don't pick him up. This CANNOT be a dream!
503. Have a character who is convinced that cell phones suck your soul out through your ears. They refuse to touch or even look at them.
504. Have a character walk around with a cat on their head for part of your novel. Don't have anyone think this is odd.
505. If you're still writing at this point in the month (this'll probably work better in America), write about Thanksgiving, ON Thanksgiving. Do not write about Thanksgiving before or after Thanksgiving. Bonus points if it actually IS Thanksgiving in your novel, and if this has any bearing on the plot.
506. Begin your novel with some sort of warning against reading the following novel. (It also works nicely, if your novel is not written in first person, to work in a couple of narrator "I" comments. J.R.R. Tolkien's children evidently did not like this sort of thing when he first wrote The Hobbit but I liked it. So there.)
507. Have your main character suddenly start lactating all over the place.
508. Have a character walk into the room dressed kind of nice. Not really formal, just a nice jacket and a nice sweater or something. Have another character say "Why are you all dressed up?" Have the first character say "What do you mean?" Have the second character say "You know, the leather jacket, the you're all crazy and stuff... what's up with that?"
509. Do you remember those "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels that were popular with the pre-teen set some years ago? Here's the dare: write one! Your novel is actually a set of interlocking short stories written in the second person singular, present tense. Short passages end with choices to be made by the reader; depending on the choice made, the character pursues the story to a successful ending or a bad one. ("If you choose to make friends with the troll, go to paragraph 64; if you bash it with a rock, go to paragraph 93." Then you go to paragraph 64 and see what happens and make more choices from there. The stories will spread out like an organization tree, which you can make as complex as you like.
510. Is your MC a woman? Good. Read on. Give her menstrual cramps. We're talking the bad ones, too, the kind that can have you whimpering for minutes at a time and that go on for a couple days. Have this be an extreme inconvenience at a critical point in your story. Maybe even have it be the deciding factor in something important, like a fight perhaps, if it's that kind of novel. Triple bonus points and my extreme sympathy if you can write this from personal experience. I know I can
511. How about a MC who suffers from mood altering PMS. The kind that makes you murderous one minute and weepy the next. (I was already planning on having a tribe of women suffer from PMS simultaneously, so I think it'll count.)
512. Do you and your friends have an inside joke that cracks you up at the slightest mention but no one else understands?I'll cite an example: Barnacles. Now, make a reference to that joke once every thousand words or once each chapter, your pick. Never explain it, and never draw any particular attention to it... just find a way to work it in each time. Bonus points if you can do this for more than one inside joke! (Don't trip over the trash can!) Heck, how about three or four? ("And shit")
513. Kill off horribly, elect to positions of power, or pit against each other in the WWE ring other nano authors in the background of your novel.
514. Have a character with a name of obvious character traits, like Charity Goodman or Evilia de Sade, who is nothing like their name. Other characters should never comment on it.
515. Use the line "He's got a good heart but he's radioactive," "I don't want to be Elfstar anymore! I want to be Debbie!", or constantly refer to wine as "harmless fruit juice."
516. Include a detailed philosophical discussion in 1337, Valley-girl, or Ebonics.
517. Include a passionate description of the difference between "egregious" and "egregiously". Bonus points for doing this without knowing what the word means.
518. Include a Bizarro version of your main character or antagonist.
519. Have a character, badly wounded, who is allergic to anything the others try to treat the wound with. Whether the character lives or dies is your choice, but brownie points if they explode in a pained shower of bloody pus.
520. If your plot is fantastical/sci-fi-fan, include a minor character (preferably a sort of military personnel) who is violently allergic to magic. Sneezing, coughing, the works. Cast as many spells as possible while this character is in the vicinity without any of the MCs noticing his/her pain.
521. Include a small cat without a nose. If anyone asks, it was "an unfortunate tuna incident".
522. Let a character having to urinate be an important plot point. IE - the antagonist wanders into the bathroom to relieve him/herself and is killed in a freak urinal explosion, rendering the hero quest less. Or, the MC excuses him/herself and misses a major exposition point. Or they're peeing acid, or gold, or meet the great wizard while washing their hands.
523. Name a male 'Jamie' and kill them off.
524. Have an evil villain in your story. Have his name be "The Procrastinator".
525. I dare your character to receive a letter from the state/government informing them that their particular birth year is being skipped. IE. "Dear ; It had been decided that you shall be 24 years old this year instead of 23 because . We apologize for any inconvenience. Have a nice day."
526. Begin your novel, a chapter, or a section of your novel with: "My boss was too of me to even fire me in person. I found the letter informing me that I was fired crammed in the door frame of my house -- couldn't this even use the mailbox!? -- upon my return from weeks in the wilderness with my boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife.”
527. Have a sentient tree in your novel. If you are writing in the realistic style have the tree be non-speaking or talking, but it takes actions that are frighteningly conscious (such as dropping pine cones on the heads of evil people, and dropping dead branches for firewood for nice people, etc). If weird shit happens in your novel, the tree can just get up and smash bulldozers, or talk with people, all it wants. (Sherri s. Tepper, anyone?)
528. Godfight!!!! Deities duke it out to settle differences in the arena! Your choice masked Lucha style or WWF madness (oops sorry, lawsuit! That's WWE now!)
529. Have your character be convinced that all of the spammy emails they receive (Free porn! Low mortgage rates!) contain secret messages that must be decoded in order for their task/quest/whatever to be successful. Tracking down of the spammers to ask for clarification on a few points is optional. Tracking down of the spammers for revenge when the "secret messages" lead the character astray would be appreciated.
530. Include a big, old Victorian house with a tree branch growing through the roof. Family of squirrels is optional.
531. Have a character run though the background of some scene, chased by woodpeckers. The reason why can be up to you.
532. Have a character who always carries a box of cookies (animal crackers?), so that when someone does something they like, they can say "Good idea! Cookie for you." or something of the sort. A reward system gone terribly wrong. I picture them stuffing cookies in people's mouths, whether the people want them or not....
533. Have every 17th thing a MC touches spontaneously combust; have this be completely inconsequential, but throughly described. These flames will never go out, nor will they 'feed off' the combusted item. (I think it's important to note that John thought of this dare while sitting on the toilet. I don't know why it's important, but it is.)
534. Include a cage match on a trampoline over a vat of jello. Involve twinkies somehow. Bonus points for ninjas, of course.
535. Include a secret conspiracy involving socks which is resolved during your novel. Or have an alien invasion occur during your novel. This should have absolutely no effect on the plot.
536. Include the line "Heu! Illa est mea toga!" (Hey, that's my toga!)
537. Get alway from your computer for long enough to head over at a local Indian/Thai/Chinese/Mexican/other-ethnic place with takeaway menus. Take one. Mention each dish on the menu in your novel, including steamed rice and every single kind of beer offered. Bonus points for descriptions.
538. here is the dryer dare...mention as often as possible odd clothing choices, mismatched socks, mismatched suits, missing sleeves or pant legs...Explain these by way of the dryer having eaten them. bonus points if this is some conspiracy. extra bonus points if it involves aliens or those Pirate Ninjas.
539. Dare you to break someone's heart. Preferably the reader's. Oh alright, you can make it be because of the grapes if you want.
540. Have a character shatter a plate and call in to the manufacturer to see if they can get a replacement. The manufacturer will send them a colossal form to fill out, including such questions as: "Did the product: A; Shatter. B; Break. C; Explode. D; Crack. E; Buckle ?" "Which of the following noises did the product make upon breaking: A; "Crack." B; "ShhkBLOWY." C; "Kkkscht." D; "PFFFK." ?"
541. For one chapter, have all the character's speak entirely in haiku's. Boggle points if you do so through the whole book.
542. If you're writing a romance novel, during the sex scene have the guy's penis fall off. Just fall off. Have him pick it up and reattach it. Do not explain it. Do not have either of the character's mention it.
543. Somehow make the goldfish jingle (not the stupid new one, that old 'I love the fishes cuz their so delicious' one) integral to your plot. Subliminal messages, rise of the fishies, I don't care.
544. Use Evil Ninja's Insult of the Day in that day's writing. every day
545. Kill of your main character multiple times, always bringing him/her back to life. Have your character get more and more annoyed with this as the story progresses.
546. Call this one "The Jeopardy Dare." The Answer: Go back and looks at those dares where someone dares the writer to write something really strange into their story, yet demands they write NO explanation for why said strangeness happens. Pick 2-5 of your favorite ones. Now, write the explanation for why blah blah blah happens and/or your character's reactions to it happening. BUT do NOT write the actual thing happening. Evening Scribe
547. Even better, (see # 519) make it a really trivial wound, but have the treatment put him in critical condition...
548. Even better, (See # 537) name each chapter for one, with the description italicized below, like you usually see with a quote. And try to make them fit... Example: 1. YUM PLA MUK: Squid salad with onions, scallions, tomatoes, lime juice, and chili. Or even better: 4. LAD NA: In which wide rice noodles are stir-fried in in sticky soy bean sauce with broccoli, and the diner must choose between beef, chicken, or pork.
549. I dare you to reference yourself, the author, in your story.
550. Have a character who is wildly obsessed with Harry Potter. The catch is, do not mention any names. That is, just have the character constantly allude and refer to the books/movies without saying the words "Harry Potter" or "Sirius Black" or even "J.K. Rowling."
551. Have one of your characters know that the novel is entirely fiction. Every once in a while, he makes a reference to this. None of the other characters have a clue what he is talking about. IE: Char1: *upset* Oh, why did he have to die in such a horrible manner. Char 2: Something had to happen, we needed a plot twist. or Char1: Are you sure this will work? Char2: It won't, because we're only halfway through the story. We will fail miserably and make many more chapters' worth of attempts before any plan we come up with will work. Char1: ...huh? That sort of thing, and have that character make a similar reference once every 1000 words or once every chapter, your choice.
552. I dare you to have a character who claims to be the pirate captain of his/her very own rubber dinghy and is damn proud of that fact. Whether this character actually goes out and attempts to do any plundering on the high seas in their dinghy is up to you.
553. I dare you to have your protagonist/antagonist base all of his/her decisions off of fortune cookies. Cheese puffs if they base it off of their interpretation of the lottery numbers on the back.
554. Have a scene where the people in the background (or the MC, your choice really) dance around a huge fire naked with wolves.
555. Have the phrases "I am Bob the one-legged fish. Moo." appear in your novel. It must make sense in the book and not be treated as anything unusual. (By the way, I didn't make this phrase up; my sister did. She's demented.)
556. Have a female character who regularly belches in public, then blames it on her father/brother/boyfriend/husband (you get the point... a guy...)
557. Make reference to the Ministry of Silly Walks at least once.
558. Have the MC and friends run across a group of minor characters that go into a song and dance number as soon as they meet the MC. None of the characters in either party will find this bizarre, and they never mention it afterwards.
559. Make a character speak in nothing but movie quotes-not just any quotes, but famous ones. For an additional challenge, only use quotes from one movie.
560. Include the line, "I find it hard to believe that nobody has yet said plinth." It must make perfect sense in context.
561. I dare you to cut to scenes of the author every now and then, slaving away writing this novel, and the author can't be you. Bonus points if they're starving/ have mountains of tissues on the floor/ have a fro/ think of their goldfish as their muse.
562. Have a character who's dialect and conversational abilities are so lacking (and they can explain this if they want) that almost everything they say is misspelled near the point of indecipherability, except for the word "baroque", which they use in incredible amounts. One could even have characters make reference to this, possibly having them wonder at what it is that this other character is describing so often as baroque.
563. Put a tarantula(or some other creature) in your novel and have it crawl on at least ten of your characters. Bonus points if it somehow gets into your characters mouth or er... 'precious'(If you don't get the reference, use find on the dares list.). The tarantula can't be the animal form of a person.
564. Have a character to is a total "Cosmo Girl". This character will not wear anything if it's not featured in Cosmo, won't do anything if it's not condoned by Cosmo, does things just because they were in Cosmo, etc. etc. Cosmo is her bible, in other words. Bonus points if the character is male. Double bonus points if the character is male and not gay!
565. Have one of your characters say "Get this cat off my groin". Personally I will prefer a not-very-naked groin.
566. Include a 4000 word long showering/bathing/similar scene. If you can do 2000 about cooking an egg (which I am... it will be easy, easy I tell you), twice the amount concerning a shower cannot be impossible. Have your characters sing, talk, do a little dance, as long as they are still in that shower. Bonus point if your character is actually focused on showering during at least one third of those 4000 words.
567. Have the third word in every chapter begin with the letter H. Better yet, have the first word in every chapter begin with X...Or not... your choice what word, letter, but you get the gist of it.
568. Somehow include this soap and/or at least one of the phrases from the page. (It's worth a click. Example: "It is extremely amazing. Made my special parts really slim down.")
569. Have at least three names of musicals. Put them in the story, /not/ as musical names, but as something completely different. For example, Jesus Christ Superstar could be someone who calls another person 'Superstar' swearing--"Jesus Christ, Superstar! You scared me!" Etc. NOBODY MUST NOTICE OR COMMENT.
570. Have a character that uses the word 'hincky'. It means 'weird'.
571. Have a villain with hay fever.
572. A person with a flea circus.
573. Dare you to include a hamuahua in your novel. A hamuahua is a cross between a hamster and a chihuahua. The sound it makes is "squark". The dare is, I guess, just to include it, but bonus if you actually make it a part of your plot, extra bonus if you explain how it exists. (Yaaaay, screwing around with genetics!)Yeah, I made up hamuahuas, and I love them. Spread the hamuahua looooove...
574. Include a character that always has his/her own personal theme music playing when they show up. This can be caused by anything from the character carrying a boom box to them being followed by the Philharmonic Orchestra wherever they go, just make it happen. Double points if their theme music is clearly porno music and nobody comments on it.
575. Include your favorite author as a character. And kill them off. Points for poetic irony.
576. Infect one of your characters with cell phone disease. You may use a more scientific-sounding name if you like. Symptoms are up to you.
577. Have one of your characters do amateur night at a strip club, lose, and never mention it again. Bonus points if it's a male.
578. 1. write a portion of dialogue, ideally dealing with ontological abstraction (as if there was any other kind) in a foreign language.
579. 1+1 = 2. write it in a different language family than the rest of your Nano. (IE. writing in English? go with Swahili. Punjabi? Try Basque.
580. 2+1 = 3. write it in cuneiform
581. My Beloved is trying to learn the phrase "I am the potato of death and I'm eaten hot with cheese" in as many languages as possible.I dare someone to use this in a novel, in a serious connotation (IE no dreaming/crazy/etc) perhaps as a response to something someone else has asked them about.
582. Have a group of random people on a staircase doing some kind of elaborate acrobatic maneuvers. Describe these maneuvers in great detail, but give no explanation. Bonus points if the staircase in question is in one of your characters' house.
583. Have one character who's obsessed with magnetic poetry.
584. Include this line: "So you see, when you titillate them, ants, they make vinegar." Work it in however you want. Skooch points if it's a cynical French professor who says it.
585. No characters in your book may be described as having blonde hair.
586. There must be an ashtray shaped like a telephone and a telephone shaped like a watermelon.
587. There must be an extremely vicious dog named Mooky.
588. Someone must make reference to having sex in a kitchen.
589. You must make as many references to the working titles of other NaNo-ers as possible.
590. A bathtub needs to overflow and flood at least three rooms.
591. One of your characters needs to give the scientific name of at least three trees during three different conversations. None of these conversations can be related to trees before mention is made of them.
592. Something unexpected must fall from the sky. No explanations.
593. Someone must say "It's a lollipop life."
594. There must be two 70-year-olds who are in same-sex relationships. Bonus points if they themselves are not together.
595. You must have three minor characters named Victoria, Victor and Vickie. Bonus points if they're in a love triangle.
596. Someone must say the line, "No, dammit, I was sure it was a fish!"
597. Someone must fall down a well. Bonus points if the person's name is Timmy.
598. You must have a 38-year-old virgin. Bonus points if s/he's not a monk.
599. One character must hate your favorite author/actor/singer with a passion. Reasons why must be given.
600. A black g-string must be found in the boot (trunk) of a car. Despite much questioning, it is never determined where it came from
601. Chapter titles must be suburbs in a city you've never been to.
602. I dare you to include "Yes. Shrubberies are my trade. I am a shrubber. My name is 'Roger the Shrubber'. I arrange, design, and sell shrubberies" somewhere in your novel. Substituting your character's name for Roger, unless your character is in fact called Roger. Bonus Points if the character actually sells a shrubbery.
603. Dialogue dare: "You're not a bitch. You have strong opinions and aren't afraid to express them. Because you're a bitch."
604. Based off one of my kittens, more commonly referred to as puppy: Have a cat that acts like a dog (chases it's tail, pulls things out of the trash, yowls at the moon, etcetera) but make no mention at all of how odd the cat's behavior is. Everyone in the novel must act as though it's perfectly normal. Bonus points for getting your audience to think it is as well.
605. To help pad the word count: Have a character that, whenever asked a question, answers with far too much information. Their response can be as gross, relevant, irrelevant, philosophical, whatever as you please (or as suits the character).
606. Because this is too cute: Use this quote from Calvin and Hobbes. "It's a high price to pay, but nuzzling tiger tummies is one of the greatest pleasures in life." No, they can't be reading the comic.*
607. Have a character who randomly will launch into their alter-ego, who goes by the name of Stinky the Corpse.
608. Either that or thinks they're ghetto when, in fact, there are snowflakes who are more black than they are. Have this character be named 'Emily Oldhook' and called 'Oldhoo' as a nickname.
609. Include at least 3 vicious games of ping-pong, at least one of which has to result in either disfiguring injury or death.
610. Include a character who speaks entirely in 80's movies quotes. Bonus points if they make sense. Double bonus if the character is a lawyer and tries a case.
611. Use the line "The world is such a chauvinistic pig" in your novel. *
612. You know the song "I'm Just A Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus? There's your plot
613. Go here -- http://www.rain-street.org/fightcrime.htm and your plot must be the first one that pops up.
614. Rewrite Perec's Exeter Text without using the letter e, no, hang on, I want to do that...
615. Mention all five of the books in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but NOT by title. For example, if someone says, "Will it kill me if I eat it?" Someone else will respond, "No, it's mostly harmless."
616. Quote at least fifteen lines from Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (I don't even care if the characters are doing the play - in fact, if they are, I really want to read your novel.) Bonus points if this has nothing to do with the infamous questions.
617. Base a character off Norman Bates.
618. Write whole chapter about going to school. I don’t mean make the person go to school just make them talk about it...like a flashback...
619. I dare someone to write about fighting corruption in PETA/the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) or some similar organization.
620. Every time your main character wakes up, have them clutching a different random item in their hands. (A xylophone, a small cake...) Offer no explanation
621. Include Zombie Elvis in your novel. Bonus points if it makes some sort of sense. (this dare originates from the newspapers on the ground in GTA3--if you're playing the game, stand over one, and look down you'll see the Zombie Elvis thing)
622. Have a character who has all his/her friends get free samples of that "space age polymer, developed by NASA" bed material.... and then stitches all the free samples together to make a full mattress.
623. I dare you to have a Character actually listen to the Radio, with DJ's talking. Bonus Points if your include Traffic that has a theme. My favorite radio station does this, it was apparently not allowed to do the Sexy Traffic anymore (naming things ejaculation and love bump), so instead they changed it to Father John's Traffic, with the big bang theory and Parting the waters. Double bonus points if you use "The Church of Lazlo" with Lazlo and Slimfast(Flimflam) and use the quote "How to make money at your kitchen table in your underwear" in a commercial.
624. Have an old geezer chasing a squirrel randomly through your scenes...saying, "come here, squirrely with your bushy tail!!!"
625. Have a character calculate the Speed of Dark. Make it critical to the plot resolution. Make sure its handled seriously.
626. As a Bonus, Have a character also figure out how to use a flashlight with the batteries in backwards to suck all the light out of a room. (Again, relevant to the plot and done with all seriousness.)
627. I dare you to include a conversation about pseudo-masochism involving leiderhosen. It should be at least semi-serious. While you're referencing the Simpsons (and be honest, when are you /not/ referencing the Simpsons?), include the cookbook How to Cook for Forty Humans in your novel.
628. Have a character attending a religious service, ritual, event, whatever, burst out laughing inappropriately (or at least start snorting). When asked what the hell is going on, have the character explain that s/he was thinking about "The Dare Thread."
629. Include snippets of conversation throughout your novel referring obliquely to your favorite authors ("I don't know, Eliot, what /have/ we given?" "So, Staples, what kind of name is that, exactly?" "So Mr. Jordan - I hear you like Emblem books." ... I couldn't think of anything actually good for this, sorry. Hopefully you'll do better.)
630. Mention every philosopher in the Bruces' Philosophers' Drinking Song by name or by thought.
631. Include the line "Sit, Ubu, sit." Bonus points if you're not referring to a dog. More bonus points if you use the Elvish form ("Havo Dad, Ubu.") My firstborn child if the Elvish is in context.
632. Name your main character something obvious like Hiro Protagonist, the main character from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash
633. Make one of your characters an Amish carnival worker.
634. Have one character think everyone is gay based on anything that they may say or do. For example 'oh he's gay - yesterday I saw him getting a diet coke from the pop machine'
635. Have a character who , where some unenlightened people would say "God, that's so gay," instead says "That's so straight" or "That's soooo hetero."
636. Have a villian/criminal who kidnaps large groups of strangers for some sinister reason through the following method: First, he obtains a bus (steals it, builds it, buys it, etc.). Then, he makes this bus out to look like the local city bus line. Then he (or his hired driver, or even better his hired robot driver) pulls up to a busy stop JUST BEFORE the scheduled time and picks up all the riders waiting for the bus, and then locks the doors and drives them off to his lair. Might want to gas the riders, just so they don't do anything to the driver or try to break out when they see that the bus isn't following the right route.
637. Include a character who believes she or he has been cursed by gypsies to turn into a gourd on the night of a full moon. The character has to legitimately believe this... can't be a dream, insanity, etc. Bonus points if he or she does.
638. At least three times in the novel, have a character attempt to say "spaceship" but instead say "superstore" and quickly correct him or herself. Have the other characters think nothing of this. *
639. Include a cult that worships lint. Bonus points if they do so while listening to Frank Mills's "Music Box Dancer." Extra bonus points if they manage to convert your main character.
640. Make your main character transition into thought mode, but DO NOT let the reader know it's all in the hero's mind. have the hero die, and then put: THE END. Space a paragraph and make the hero say "geez, I need to lay off the pudding pops."
641. Have a 700 word conversation where every third sentence, a character gets hit with something falling from the sky or by the other person in the conversation.
642. Have a random businessman/manager/boss type blunder into an important conversation and say "I'm looking for Mike Hunt, has anyone seen Mike Hunt? I really have to find Mike Hunt, it's urgent!"
643. Write a segment or quotation that's supposed to be translated from another language, with a pun that doesn't work in English. Hopefully-Quick Thinker
644. Have a character that's associated with an animal society and have them trying to convert people to this society(a unknown cult perhaps?)...but it has to be a quirky animal like a beaver, otter, moose, armadillo etc etc.
645. Hi. First off, if you're conservative AND you completely support our U.S. president and think he's doing a great job...then frankly please accept the fact that the following dare is PROBABLY going to offend you, so please consider skipping past it. Which probably won't happen because we're all a curious bunch. By creating the following dare, I am NOT declaring any intent or wish to harm our current president, I just think this dare would make a VERY interesting read if carried out on paper. I mean NO disrespect to anyone or their views, I simply am NOT a conservative and do NOT like my current president. So with that said: IF you are writing a story that involves either a war on terrorism or a very unpopular war which many of your characters do not support, then I dare you to give George W. Bush a cameo in which he is NOT president and neither was his father, other than that they live the exact same lives, (so do your research LOL) George W. is a member of the Army and gets called into active duty, gets horribly injured, and dies a slow, painful death weeks later by infection of the wound due to inadequate medical care through a hospital billing paperwork glitch of some kind. He doesn't need to be a main character but his thoughts and feelings should be very thoroughly examined. Bonus points for doing this very well and giving it the attention to detail and respect it deserves. Quadruple bonus points if you are in fact conservative in your political views. (Posted the disclaimer as well as the dare. Just in case. ^_-)
646. Make a somewhat secondary character die from getting his little toe stuck in a mouse trap. Makes no sense, huh.
647. Have one of your characters yell "My God he has a spork, run for your life!"
648. Include the following line: "Assembly is for wimps...everyone knows that the way to take 3.25 to the PIth power on the x86 processor is D9 EB 68 00 00 50 01 D9 04 24 D9 F1 D9 F0 D9 E8 DE C1 D9 1D followed by the storage address in little endian order!" Bonus points if the person s/he's talking to says the corresponding mnemonics. Hopefully-Quick Thinker
649. Include a reference to "Delicious Eloi Rings" or "The Morlock All Nite Buffet" in your story.
650. I dare you to not edit anything your cat types by walking across your keyboard. Work it into the story instead. "But darling, I love you! How can you just walk awcfdcf66666666 ..."Dear God," he interrupted, staring at her as her words descended into gibberish, "What's happening to your tongue? It's turning green!" That kinda thing. (I have never wanted a cat so badly in my life. Actually, I've never wanted a cat in my life, but if I had one, I would SO take this dare. This is the best dare ever.)
651. Have a character in your story, have a hearing problem and whenever someone tells him something for the first time he mistakes it for something naughty then gets it the second time you tell him it. (the character doesn't have to be important) Soul Destroyer Nightmare
652. Have a character, major or minor, that is just obsessed with bleach. Simple huh? For example: All they do is talk about bleach, how they love the smell of it, how it can take the color out of jeans, that it gets rid of pesky dirt stains on your white dog, etc. Possibly have this character do "drive-by bleachings" or walking by something (like a washing machine or a car's engine) and start pouring bleach everywhere cuz it looked like it needed some disinfecting or cleaning.
653. Do a NaNo that is not only not a comedy, but completely devoid of comic relief of any kind. Hopefully-Quick Thinker
654. At a critical moments in your novel your characters suddenly are transported into a musical. They must figure out how to return to their plot without disrupting the musical in any way. Bonus points if the musical is Moulin Rouge!. Double points if there are multiple musicals with a theme (e.g. all the musicals are Rogers & Hammerstien's or Andrew Lloyd Webber's). Triple points if they are all movie musicals. Quadruple points if the entire novel is a series of escapes from musicals.
655. There must be a horse named Lucky and his friend, a chicken named Plucky.
656. Have a character who works at a fast food outlet but wears their uniform all the time. Even if you just have them wear their McDonald's hat every day, it counts...but references to this fact must be made once a chapter/section.
657. Have a character who starts every conversation with "Did you get a new couch?" regardless of whether or not they know the person or have ever been at the person's house before.
658. Have a character who carries around a lucky screwdriver (not the drink, the tool - although the former would be even more amusing). Don't just mention it once, go crazy with it. Have a ritual your character performs before a job interview, maybe have them place it behind their ear like some people do with cigarettes. Bonus points if the tip is broken and there's no way you could use it for its intended task.
659. Have a character or two paint their fingernails with marker (anyone seen Crazy/Beautiful a million times like I have?). Bonus points if it's a Tuesday night ritual with popcorn and cheesy music.
660. Have a scene in which someone shoplifts (successfully or not, it's up to you) from someplace like Goodwill or Salvation Army, and brag about it.
661. Have a character who insists they can tell time by looking at the position of the sun in the sky. Bonus points if your novel takes place in a contemporary setting. Double if it's raining when they say it.*
662. Have a character who carries around a random instrument (could be anything from a kazoo to a French horn to a children's xylophone) and plays it every hour on the hour. No one in the novel thinks anything weird of it...
663. Put a commercial where you advertise a line of Turkish and Russian Janitors.
664. Have your characters break out into song. Bonus points if it's completely original. Extra bonus points if the song is from that one episode of Buffy. * (Another one I was planning on doing anyway.)
665. Have any two (vaguely) famous politicians of opposing parties get caught having an affair. Double points if they are both male. Triple points if they run off to Ontario and get married.
666. Have a character named Cunegonde who is raped and killed by Bulgarians, but reappears several chapters later, with little to no explanation of how she has returned from the dead.
667. I dare you to work in the Monty Python french castle scenes. And have them fit. Change the characters (IE your MCs not Arthur) but keep the rest.
668. Include a plot twist, which prominently features strawberry yogurt, that will leave deep psychological scars on your main character. Must be strawberry! None of that black cherry or blueberry junk!
669. Have a character (bonus points for a major character) who ONLY speaks in rhyme. More bonus points if they only speak in rhyming couplets.
670. Have a superhero who restores perfect credit in a single ___.
671. Inspired by the movie Siu lam juk kau (Shaolin Soccer in English): Have a villain talking about how some underling of his will defeat the heroes because he has "The American Medicine." Then cut to a scene with the person being shot up with a purple liquid from a large hypodermic needle.
672. Open an encyclopedia (or the index of Microsoft Encarta. Whatever.). Close your eyes. Flip through and point. Boom! Take that topic and use it as relevant symbolism throughout your novel. Refer to it at least once per chapter. Bonus points (do the points really matter?) if the topic or object takes a key role in the plot.
673. Use a dartboard to determine your plot, IE: "The hero is" ~thawk~ "a young orphan" ~thwak~ "with a mysterious past and his only friend is" ~thwak~ "his flying gopher. He's trying to save the world from" ~thawk~ "his power hungry half-brother who" ~thawk~ "molested him before killing his parents and abandoning him" ~thawk~ "in a herd of goats. Over the course of his journey he will meet," ~thawkthawkthawk~ "a belly-dancer with a heart of gold and a metal arm, a ten year old with psychic powers over motorcycles, and a beautiful woman who is the incarnation of his dead mother." ~thawk~ "They ride around on a giant labrador retriever."...or have a character who is a writer use this method.
674. Have a character yell, "Whoooohooo" during sex, like they are on a roller coaster.
675. Either name a character a palindromic name, or to use a palindrome to guide part of your plot, then have a character recite the palindrome which explains it.
676. Create a character with a drastic twitch because they're trying to resist the urge to pull out the hairs on the top of people's noses....
677. Have a character with a screwdriver who, every time he enters a lift, removes a screw. Then towards the end of the story there is a brief mention of a mass collapse of lifts in the city, say on the back of a newspaper someone is reading.
678. Have a character who's only aim in life is to make the perfect sandwich. This must be his/her only motivation for getting out of bed in the morning, facing the day etc etc. Everything revolves around the perfect sandwich or the pursuit thereof. Bonus points if the character actually makes the perfect sandwich and is made UN secretary general based solely on said sandwich.
679. If you know who Ryouga from Ranma ½ is, then include him in your story. Have him wander in at various important plot points wondering where the hell he is, how he got there, and if anyone knows how he can get to where he wants to go. If you do not know who Ryouga from Ranma ½ is, just include a character with a horrible sense of direction that keeps wandering into your novel at inopportune times. Bonus points if this character can turn into a small black pig.
680. Have a character who owns his own one-person business, but tries to seem like a big company by setting up an elaborate voice-mailbox phone system with voice menus directing you to various departments (press "2" for marketing, etc.), *four-digit* extensions for "if you know the extension of the person you are trying to reach", going out and finding a bunch of different people to record their voices for the voice-mailbox greetings, etc., with it all, in the end, dumping into his one real voice mail box. (This is real life -- someone I used to work for.)
681. Use this phrase somewhere in your dialogue: "Don't put mustard on the cat!"
682. And, continuing with the Eddie Izzard theme, have your bad guy build a vast empire through the cunning use of flags.
683. Have a random Italian drive through on a moped every few thousand words or so and say "Ciao." Doesn't even have to be the same Italian, but s/he must be on a moped and must say "Ciao." Muse Muffin
684. To make it a mortal offense for a radio station to antagonize its listeners by playing the same few songs over and over again. Heck! Whenever your story starts slow down, have a radio station get caught violating the law, and a semi (or very) important character works there, and has to be rescued in order for the story to continue.
685. Have your character meet always the one and same person in the lift (if there's a lift in his/her house), no matter what time of the day. Always. In the end of your novel, make your character go and tell something important to the person-in-the-lift, only to find that the person is NOT in the lift, for the fist time.
686. From the list below, select at least five items and feature them in a chapter, preferably as more than a one-liner. Combining items is not allowed; each reference must be discrete. The list: hang gliding; Marshmallow-Blasted Froot Loops; ostrich ferns; movie theater popcorn; stamp collecting; a sock with a hole in the toe; a black marble; hopscotch; green tea; narcolepsy; melting wax; static cling; chapped lips; newts.
687. Write a scene about a group of people who are supposed to meet each other somewhere, but let them all end up in different parts of the city they were supposed to meet in.
688. Somehow work in the phrases "All your base are belong to us" and "Someone sent us up the bomb" or some other quotes from Zero Wing. (http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/story.shtml)
689. Have one of your characters (or set of characters) try to explain why another character from a completely different culture should adhere to some random and somewhat obscure superstitious tradition. Example (and this actually happened): Two Americans try to explain to a Korean why killing ladybugs is a Very Bad Thing. Bonus points if this has to do with a major plot point. Double bonus points if your argument is logically sound.
690. Have a character - not necessarily a main one - have some item that they desperately need to have signed by completely random people. For example, a stuffed animal. Bonus points if you can come up with a completely logical, yet off the wall, reason for this compulsion. (So it's not a hobby, dare, or scavenger hunt thing.)
691. Have someone in your story who is trying to legally change their name to the name of a cartoon character. (Like this guy.)
692. Have a character volunteer at a homeless shelter and make a heart breaking discovery while he/she is there. Whether the discovery is a person (like a relative) or thing (like a box of old love letters) is entirely up to you.
693. Have a character drop change into the cup of a beggar on the street, then suddenly recognize the person as their long-lost [insert whatever you'd like here].
694. Have a character obsessed with always knowing what time it is. Have him/her look at their watch and/or other clocks frequently, then announce the time.
695. Somehow work in some quotes from the Strong Bad emails from homestarrunner.com. Bonus points if they actually fit in to your novel and make sense.
696. Include a group of young girls in pajamas and pigtails in a setting where you normally wouldn't see this. ladybug218
697. Have your main character refer to at least 3 of the following; Dashboard Confessional, Lord Of The Rings, Harry Potter, Wuthering Heights, and Pete Yorn's Burrito without referring to the actual band/song/movie/book. Take it totally out of context. E.g. I'm going to visit The Lord of the Rings today, he had his wisdom teeth pulled yesterday.
698. Have your characters engage in a long and violent game of Magic: The Gathering
699. Have a character randomly say that they'll eat a cricket and that they had before, and mean a cooked cricket. Then have another character pressuring them into eating one of the ground and making good on his/her word and have them eat it whole and alive.
700. Have a society where the police have developed specially-bred K-9 units with poisonous fangs. So basically, if you're bitten by a police dog, you are dead within a minute. Dogs are trained not to attack unless commanded by their particular officer.
701. [Include] a myopic character who turns into a duck!
702. Have your entire novel begin or end with a character saying the words, "My precious..." If you can't do that, at least begin or end a chapter with it!
703. Have various characters react to situations or spoken phrases with various roleplaying terms no matter the time period. (They don't have to be actual proper terms if they at least have a basis.) Examples: WHITE WOLF "I have the right to eat that ice cream before you do!" "Hah! I retest Stealth!" "Bounced with I'm Prettier!" "BLAST YOU! I'll have that delicious and generally tasty-looking confectionary delight yet, fiend!" DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS During a particularly nasty battle between the hero and his nemesis... "Can I make a saving throw?" "No." "Oh, please?" "...Well, just a little one, then."
704. Have a character wear pants with a large array of peacock feathers attached to the back to scare predators away. Nobody finds this weird, and those that see it may or may not feel the desire to copy the genius idea.
705. Have a character, major or minor, get into trouble with the law for peddling high-quality sugar to hyperactive children on the local school playground. Battles with law enforcement and/or police dogs optional.
706. Have a character who starts every sentence with "in accordance with the prophesy...." Bonus points if when somebody finally asks "What prophesy?!" the character responds "I.....don't know..."
707. Use the line "Men are all hypothalamus and no amygdale" at least twice. *
708. Have a character whose diet consists solely of Salsa Doritos
709. Have God yell at the narrator
710. Have a character say: Ohhhh, I drank too many melonades
711. Like [#700], but make them robot dogs (think Fahrenheit 451). Include the dialogue: "He's malfunctioning!" - "Mal-what?" "Malfunctioning. Preston is a cyber-dog."
712. Have a character whose socks/underwear/clothes go missing every time they wash them and blame it solely on the Underpant Gnomes. Bonus points if one actually appears when the character is doing laundry
713. Have a character dream they're in their underwear in at least 5 different public places.
714. Write 1500 words about running out of shampoo or conditioner while in the shower. However, if you've already taken on the earlier shower scene dare, you can't count this as a separate dare.
715. Have somebody agree to meet someone else somewhere at sunset (or a variation of this). Then have the person who suggested meeting at sunset say, "You know what they say about sunset...." and pause for a long time before saying, "Yep," and changing the subject, or just leaving. [If anyone actually gets this reference, I have a new best friend.]
716. Write a chapter (or more) of your novel regarding two people waiting by a tree expecting to meet a man who will never come. It would be really neat if they never left the tree and had never actually MET the man they were expecting. (If you care to know where this is from, and don't already, then just ask.)
717. Include an atheist who keeps a biblical story (or something like Footprints) and/or a crucifix (or some other obvious religious insignia) around at all times and refuses to part with it.
718. Have somebody pull a cooked chicken out of her purse. (This would work well with an old woman.)
719. Have a character say only, "Yeah," throughout the entire novel. Try not to make it obvious that all this character says is, "Yeah," just throw in the character who has a few lines now and then and nobody thinks anything of later in the story.
720. Include at least three references to Queen songs.
721. Kill a character and have his last words be, "Oh, I am slain!"
722. Have a dog appear in your novel. Make his name inconsistent. (Kudos if you can spell out a secret message using his name.)
723. Include a '60s or cartoonish moment that they never do anymore. Sort of like this: Thief steals rare gems, thief runs away pursued by cop, thief throws off mask and leans casually against the wall, cop runs up to thief and asks where he went, thief replies, "He went that way!", cop runs off said that way.
724. Work in every line Eddie Izzard says in Dressed to Kill into your nano. Make it so that the lines are dispersed at random throughout your novel and not necessarily in order.
725. Have a character say, "My id and my superego hate each other" in dialogue.
726. Make one of your larger supportive characters, or main character if it happens to fit with what you're doing, a talking bug of some kind - insect or arachnid - whatever. But it can't be a bad guy.
727. Have a sappy moment about something, lots of over dramatics, etc. Then have the character get up/shrug/whatever, look at the sky, and shout "The invisible violinists can stop now! And quit whining about how you aren't payed enough!" And then just look back at the other character, who is looking at them oddly, and say "What?"
728. Have a character reply to serious questions using the lyrics of a song. Extra points if all lyrics are from Beatles songs.
729. Have one character be the token Aboriginal / African American / etc. and realize this. Have them make sarcastic comments throughout the novel on their own stereotypes.
730. Have a character (major, minor, whatever) who habitually uses one unusual word, without meaning to. It can be pointed out or not, explained or not, but they have a particular overblown word that they use ALL THE TIME. Something like "inexplicable" or "extricate" or "ambulate." It's just the first thing that comes to mind, for whatever reason. Especially if they're not a generally intellectual or wordy sort. Inspiration: I realized today that I use "tangential" nearly every day, for no good reason.
731. There is a building called The Velvet Touch Adult Lingerie and Video Store. It is painted bright purple. I dare you to include it.
732. Add the line, "I think so, Brain, but where are we going to get that many enemas during Ramadan?" Stir, enjoy, send flames via p.m.
733. 'He was always such a nice boy. The way he dressed, the way he acted... heck, even the Nazi's loved him, and he was Jewish'
734. Ok, you guys, this is something I used to do in high school and I still (pathetically) do: Using a pack of gum --you know the kind that has like 17 sticks in it--and save all the white papers. when you're done with the gum pack, number the papers and write a separate note on everyone of the papers. Or write one word on all the papers to create a sentence (I love you so much it makes me wonder what I would d without you, etc). this would be great for any secret message--it could be sold at a soviet Circle K or something. Or it could be done for a love letter
735. Have a character continuously putting on nail polish, but no one knows what color of nail polish it is, and no one ever sees him/her taking the nail polish off. Bonus points if he or she tends to spill nail polish on things.
736. Have four to five references to Pete and Pete throughout your novel. Yes, I am a sad, sad man.
737. Even worse, refer to Pete and Re-Pete
738. I dare you to have a male character walk around with a T-shirt that says "Psycho Bitch" on it.
739. Have one character fill out one of them internet surveys (with the "what is your dream?" and "what person, dead or alive, would you want to meet?" kind of questions), and the char has to make hamster-connected answers. (i.e. "what person, dead or alive, would you most want to meet?" "my dead hamster, Billy")
740. Use a phobia somewhere in your novel. It can be explained or not. Bonus Points if it's a really odd phobia like "Medomalacuphobia- Fear of losing an erection.". Check out: Phobia List. The phobias are all listed alphabetically.
741. Keep making Styrofoam pop up in random places all through the novel. with no explanation as to why. bonus points if the main character finds it insanely funny
742. Let two or three characters have a long conversation using only weeble and bob lines (i.e. "Mmm, pie" "ladies like pie?" and "lo, bob." "ARGH! PIE!") That should make for silliness, a lot of extra words, both as they speak and as everyone else tries to figure out what the hell they’re talking about, and general fun.
743. Keep making styrofoam pop up in random places all through the novel. with no explanation as to why. bonus points if the main character finds it insanely funny.
744. I dare you to...Write a chapter in the style of either: a) James Joyce b) L.M Montgomery or c) Jane Austen
745. Include some variation of the line "I can't stand to see people doing bad things to women. Now mind you, I did once throw a hand grenade into a room full of nuns. But I don't much like to talk about it."
746. Make chocolate a major plot point in your story. Bonus points if you include a "death by chocolate" in the most original way possible, choking doesn't give bonus points, too normal....unless you can think of a really weird twist.
747. I'm doing this one, so I thought I'd put it up here for anyone who wants to to chew on - make a character talk backwards. Either have the words backwards "ekil siht", have the phrase backwards "this like", or both "siht ekil".
748. Dare and mega-shameless word count boosting all in one: Character one: "[a long sentence with lots of alliteration]" Character two: "Bet you can't say that ten times fast!" Character one: "[a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration], [a long sentence with lots of alliteration]"
749. Have one of your characters notice that a mirror is reflecting something slightly different than what it should be. A fall painting's reflection is a spring scene, for example. Make it minor idle observation (you can chew up lots of words on this!), or a major plot point...
750. Find some way to fit the phrase "secret agent gardener" into your novel in a perfectly serious context. Hey, if I can do it, so can you.
751. I dare you to have "Local woman" in your story. She wants to be there.
752. I dare you to have someone say "I could be your bull".
753. I dare you to mention a badger, a mushroom and a snake in the same paragraph.
754. I dare you to have someone say "You got to screw the general's daughter"
755. I dare you to use "grindylow" in a sexual context.
756. Have one of your main characters randomly say ' I shall call him squishie, and he shall be mine, and he shall be my squishie!'
757. I dare you to have your character open a closet door at one point and see a conga line come out. Conga line in a closet = instant party. If you like, it can also be a conga line o'DOOM.
758. I dare you to include the line, "Sure, blame the homicidal maniac!"
759. My dare is to have a character have hallucinations of anime characters interacting with them. Something for the otakus to be happy with. I'm not going to do it as I came up with it, but it's an idea a few will like, I would guess.
760. I dare you.... to have one of your characters be asked a serious question about Hitler/Nazi Germany, and have them answer with a line from Springtime for Hitler (The Producers). Everyone takes them very seriously.
761. Make 1 chapter a talk show with the characters of your novel. At the end kill the talk show host because he has a stupid spinning bow tie that he spins every 2 sentences.
762. Have a character overdose on vitamins. Yes, vitamins. The effects are up to you, just as long as it happens.
763. Have a chapter/paragraph/whatever start out with, "She knew she would regret not looking in the mirror before she went out this morning." The catch? you have to be referring to a male character.
764. Have a major or minor character always referred to along with a physical trait. For example, every time Malcolm would talk, it would be in his dark, deep, seductive voice.
765. A character cannot tell the difference between green peas and seed pearls. Explain it however you like: a medical disorder, a wizard's curse, whatever, but the character cannot discern through his senses the difference between the two.
766. I'd like to dare whomever to include a cat who is deathly afraid of rubber ducky. This must come up during at least three separate points in the novel.
767. I dare you to have a character say these random things, at some point.“A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants” “Let’s file this under emotional scarring” “What if the hocky pocky really is what it’s all about?” “Even if the voices aren't real, they have some good ideas!” also, include a reference to S.B.A.C (squirrel burning association of Canada ) you can change the country, but not the rodent. double points if you use them all. triple points if if it's the same character, and (s)he's sane
768. If anyone is familiar with Mystery Science Theater 3K, Torgo, the "monster" with the big thighs from Manos The Hands of Fate, must make at least a speaking cameo somewhere in your novel.
769. I dare you...to have a outwardly respectful character that writes cheesy, raunchy romance novels under a cheesy fake name. Bonus Points if you include clips from the romance novels.
770. Dare: Have a cameo appearance of the book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing 50,000 Words in One Month.
771. I dare you to include the following stupid in-joke: "Knock knock." "Who's there?" "Yo momma." "Hi, Mom!" yeah, comes from real life... and I was the dumbass who said "Hi Mom." Now my friends just say "Knock knock" and I start with the uncontrollable snorting. They do it at the most inopportune times...
772. Write something where the newest, hottest trend in fashion is the NaNo t-shirt. Make it so that every fashion designer and magazine is oohing and aahing over it.
773. I dare you to give your character a pink beat up old car (doesnt matter what kind) that plays 'home on the range' when you honk the horn...and have your characters describe it like that everytime...example: Then we hopped into the old beat-up pink car that plays home on the range when you honked the horn and drove to my friends house.
774. Have a character that is overly obsessed with pac man
775. Have a character who's name is 'The Big Fat Guy' and have him say 'blub blub' between each sentance...and make him obsessed with spaghetti
776. Have a superhero named Muffin Boy
777. se the words pulchritudinous, animadversion, pukka, and pusillanimous, all in one scene, preferably in one paragraph. They must relate to each other somehow; no linguist characters may be involved; no one may be insane; and you may not give the reader an explanation of the words' meanings.
778. Just have as many references to the HP fandom as possible. That oughta make it real fun.
779. I dare you... to start every damned chapter with "It was a dark and story night." Smart-ass modifications and extentions of the sentance, such as "For once, it wasn't a *bleep* dark and story night!" acceptable.
780. Include a secret organization devoted to the destruction of the abomination that is known as Arial
781. Have a gay man suddenly discover that he's really straight, and in love with a straight woman who's suddenly discovered that she's really gay.
782. I dare you to use the line: "wouldn't want any of my vicious socks to go unpunished"... and have it make sense!!!!
783. Have a character get a grape stuck in their sinuses. No amount of snotting or inhaling will make it come out until they are in some serious, dangerous or sad moment.
784. I DARE YOU TO SAY: Much to {{insert MC here}}'s Chagrin, the men's rest room only had pink toliet paper. But, I must know, did Sally ever really sell seashells by the seashore?
785. Someone in your story must eat a slice of butter from her bread plate honestly believing it was a dinner mint.
786. Use the word "promiscuous" at least six times in under 100 words. must be in casual conversation.
787. Several times over the course of the novel, mention "joe and bobby's authentic canadian frog catching". give no explanation.
788. So anyway, I dare whoever is so inclined to write 2000 words wondering randomly about someone behind the scenes who is doing something random. In mine the someone (who may be he or she or squee or thingymahoosit finger type finger) is pulling on finger type fingers that may or may not be finger pulling type fingers.
789. I dare someone to have an otherwise sane and nonmusical character to use the phrase, "what kind of deal can you give me on a hundred and fifty kazoos?"
790. Have a character run across the street completely naked. This cannot be in a dream sequence or anything, and the character must be entirely sane.
791. Have all your characters get kidnapped by a bunch of barbarians somehow, and then come up with a really bizarre escape plan. Bonus points if they can't communicate with the people who captured them. Even more bonus points if they almost end up as a human sacrifice. A million bonus points if your novel isn't fantasy or historical fiction.
792. Make a cameo appearance in your novel and complain about how it's so damn hard to write 50,000 words. Make the speech very deep and metaphorical.
793. Have a character get drunk and sleep with a complete stranger. Bonus points if they're the same sex. Even more bonus points if they end up being friends.
794. Have one of your characters get kicked out of school. Then all through the rest of the novel, have them run into problems because they didn't stay in school long enough to learn Latin. Bonus points if you include a scene in which the teacher is explaining the importance of Latin and the character is talking about who has a nice ass. Even more bonus points if your novel doesn't take place in a time in which Latin is actually necessary. Have a scene where the character stays up all night studying "Latin for the complete moron" and increase your word count by conjugating a bunch of Latin words.
795. At some point have a character yell "PENIS!!!!" with no explanation. No dream sequences, and character must be sane.
796. When introducing a character, use one sentence in which every single word begins with the same letter. Feel free to use alliterative sentences throughout the novel with the same character for bonus points.
797. Microwave a hamster or other small creature (this is the first scene of my novel).
798. Include a pillow fight. Between two villains.
799. Preface as many nouns as possible with the phrase 'nice shiny'.
800. Have this conversation take place: Random Girl Scout: "Would you like to buy some Girl Scout cookies?" Random Character, joking: "Are they made from real Girl Scouts?" RGS, serious. "Yes."
801. Have characters, when trying to work some way out of a difficult situation but don't know what to do, pose the question, "What would Brian Boitano do?" ("What would Nancy Kerrigan do?" is an alternative.)
802. Before a woman is about to get married, have her best gay friend announce to her (as he hands her off to her husband-to-be), "This is probably a bad time to tell you this, but I'm straight." Whether he's serious or not is up to you.
803. Name a character "Cthulhu." Bonus points if it's a kid on his first day of school, and the pronounced effect of saying his name is different every time. Lots more bonus points if it's not a fantasy.
804. Include The Scottish Musical.
805. Have someone come down with pneumanoultramicroscopicsilicovolcaniconiosis. It's a respiratory disease caused by inhaling tiny harmful particles, as far as I can tell. Bonus points for amusing mispronounciations.
806. If part of your novel includes non-Japanese in Japan, have them enter an A/V store in search of DVDs, only to find that it's actually an Adult Video store. Donuts if they're minors.
807. Have a character who can read wingdings. Even better, have two, and have them pass secret messages using it. When I was about 13 or 14 I actually tried to teach myself wingdings, but I got too bored.
808. My dare- cameo of Douglas Adams, preferably with scifi elements involved. Make it as ironic as possible.
809. My dare: Have the narrator take scenes where it's not a dark and stormy night /very/ seriously. Like, 'It was not a *censored* dark and stormy night. There wasn't a *censored* cloud in the *censored* sky, *censored* mother nature.' Also, all the *censoreds* add to the word count.
810. I have a dare and I'm not sure if it is here alreasdy but ok my dare. Use the line from Pirates of the Caribbean. "But why is the rum gone?"
811. Style Dare: write a section only with words of one syllable. Or maybe have a character who talks that way.
812. Dare: Make a character that when entering a restaurant/shop/etc. will not stay if there are any grammar or spelling errors on the menu or signs and gets deeply offended at informal English usage
813. One who, any time s/he sees a sign saying something like ".99 cents", argues with the cashier, saying that this really means 99 hundredths of a penny (which it does), so he should be able to pay them a penny and get change. (I tried to argue with a cashier about this once, but they just got confused. Sorry guys - 0.99 dollars is VERY DIFFERENT from 0.99 cents, same as 99 dollars is different from 99 cents!)
814. Another dare: Have a character that works for Antiques Roadshow (or some pathetic shoot-off) that continually breaks all of the antiques they appraise; they could desperately try to conceal it in a myriad of ways. This could make for an interesting turn- or a drunk in a bus station.
815. You must reference “The Noodle Incident” at least 5 times in your story. You cannot explain what “The Noodle Incident” is, but it is a huge blackmail-like event that the characters in question could get into huge trouble if they were found out. Or, if it is already known the characters do not want to discuss it because the memory is too embarrassing. Either way, you cannot know what “The Noodle Incident” ever is.
816. Have a bar which has a different fictional bartender in each of its scenes. "Gimme a beer, Moe." (Insert 10,000 words here) "Hi, Crystal!" (Another 15k) "Hey, Woods."
817. Write an entire book without using the word "if."
818. I dare you to include a character whose only lines are "Dude, sweet!" and "Dude, not sweet!" Repeat as necessary.
819. I dare you to get a character into a sailor suit or school girl outfit and have them randomly interupt a crime, including the line, "In the name of the moon I will punish you!"
820. Make at least one sentence, of ten words or more, all of whose words are in alphabetical order.
821. Have all your character's names start with the same letter. Or give two of them the same first name.
822. Include one character whose gender is never identified, ever.
823. Spell out a word, phrase, sentence, or entire paragraph using the first letters of succeeding paragraphs.
824. Pick a word, preferably an uncommon one, and use it every 1,000, 5,000 or 10,000 words, precisely. If you edit, you have to move the word so it lines up.
825. Include multiple anagrams of "NaNoWriMo" in your novel. Have Mr. Ian Woon eat a warm onion while watching "Win A Moron" hosted by Ron O'Mawni!
826. Make the rest of your major plot decisions by way of one- or two- hour duration polls on the polling forum.
827. Use the line "I'll have to thank the LGMs later for putting that one up my sleeve." LGMs are Little Green Men. It doesn't have to make sense.
828. Your characters drive by two young teenagers (one boy and one girl) walking along the road. There cannot be any interaction. (Well, maybe a wave.) Mentioning where they are geographically is a bonus. These are my main characters, so it will be fun to see them in others stories.
829. Have your main character come across the wonderful joy of eating a lemon in front of five other random people. Show your character's reaction to the...erm...excellent...fruit. (No sugar allowed, of course) Have the mc hop up and down a very busy road sucking on the lemon and yelling "I HAVE LEMONY PROBLEMS" to all who can hear.
830. Give two characters the same first name, and make a scene in which it is difficult to tell which a character is talking to, thinking about, attracted to, or something else of that nature. It must be something meaningful. I'm doing this in a big way. It was an accident to give the one character the same first name as the main character (this minor character is the only one with a surname yet, and the first name was unimportant--though all my names have been pulled from the air at time of creation), but I stuck with it, and decided to use it. It will actually make a really interesting twist.
831. Have a character impersonate Lurch from the Munsters.
832. Have a character that's always trying to break out into song, but always get interrupted.
833. Include the shoeshine guy from the old "Police Squad" TV series(which spawned the "Naked Gun" movies). This shoeshine guy who is an authority on everything, but won't talk unless you cough up.
834. Make an adult character. not old but just around 30s 40s that doesn’t have any problems physically or mentally. have this character pee his/her pants all of the time. there cant be anything wrong with the person. but they have to have no control over their bladder.
835. Every time any character says "I don't know," have a bucket of green slime get dumped on them from somewhere - a la You Can't Do That on Television.
836. Write a paragraph of your novel blindfolded. Or just close your eyes. Or just wait until you get tired and can't keep your eyes open and then try to type. If you're a touch typist, go for a whole chapter or something. If you're not, well, a paragraph of incomprehensible random letters can't be bad for your word count, can it?
837. Kill your main character. I mean, come one, you're sick of him/her and you really need to switch to another character.. You know this is true.
838. Have one of your characters say "I'm doomed. One little slip like that can cause the Great Pumpkin to pass you by."
839. I dare you to let one of your characters read aloud a page of the telephone book. Be sure to write the numbers like five instead of 5 for a -lot- of extra words.
840. Include a character who closely identifies with one specific type of vegetable in a deep and abiding way. Kinda like furries, but with vegetables. My guy likes pumpkins, and holds religious beliefs in the Great Pumpkin. Of course, he is also resident in a mental institution, being persecuted for said religious beliefs.
841. Find some way to fit in a gory description of your main character losing a limb, and have him say something along the lines of "merely a flesh wound!" (MPATHG reference! WOOT!)
842. And, um.... Running out of ideas.... Spend 2000 words talking about the evils of cheese and cheese-like products.
843. Write at least one page of dialogue in a "foreign language"-it cannot actually BE a foreign language, but a really sloppy approximation of one. ie. "Hoi shung whaaaaaa," Mary said. "Hoo shu bi eeechy ro!" Bob replied. And so on. Bonus points if you can actually discern what the conversation is supposed to be about.
844. Reference an ad for a furnature store called "Sofa King" which reads: "Prices Sofa King low, you won't believe it!"
845. Have a character fly off the handle...literally.
846. Write about a penguin eating an entire tin of Penguin Energy Mintsand any mayhem that ensues.
847. I dare you to have a male character who is very loved by women, "break up" with his best guy friend then keep an online journal about this friend where all his adoring fans twitter with each other, thinking it is about them.
848. I hope this hasn't been posted before, but have segments of online chats, and have one of the characters speak only in AOLspeak.
849. I dare you to write approximately 1000 words about licking icing off a spoon...and try to stay away from innuendo.
850. Have your characters meet some random star, for example Cher, at the headquarters of an underground organization who wants to take over France. Only, they find out...that they've been framed from the star (Cher)! And this star has secretly been forming a personal army of glow in the dark hippos.
851. Write a chapter from the point of view of an inanimate object.
852. Espescially if it's fantasy/sci-fi/whatever, name a spaceship or ship or airship or boat or something "The Blue Canary." Or just include a blue canary night-light. Extra points if know what that's from
853. Have a guy who is a romantic interest in the novel routinely conduct conversations while at bended knee, which he does for the express purpose of making sure the MC won't know when to expect a proposal.
854. Have a character go for a haircut.
855. Have guest appearnce by timon and pumba in drag
856. Zeus/God the Father. "I the Lord your God am a jealous god. Divorce your sister".
857. Have a debate over: How can you say 1+1=2 when you can't prove that 1+1...for all you know 2 is 1 and 1 is 5
858. Have someone read an excerpt from a different book out loud
859. Have a female character go on a quest for tampons, or a male character get roped into going on a quest for tampons with or without a female character.
860. Twist a children's story like "Little Red Riding Hood" so that it's quite a bit more entertaining. I just wrote 1,000 words on "Little Red Riding Hood" being a young girl with Russian mafia ties, trying to bribe her grandmother into giving her more inheritance. It may be sick, but it was sure fun to write.
861. Have any character [the older, the better] constantly try to start a game of 'Duck, Duck, Goose' by running up to any people and tapping their heads, calling them either duck or goose, and running off like a bat out of hell when one is called goose.
862. I dare you to have P.L.O.T. Ninjas in your story. Not plot ninjas, but P.L.O.T. Ninjas. Possibly Lost, Out-of-Time Ninjas.
863.OK, here's my dare...have a teaspoon become an integral part of the action in at least one scene, with bonus points if the teaspoon becomes a recurring item.
864.I dare you... to write 42 novels, 50,000 words each, in 31 days. After all, we all know that 42 is the answer to everything. And for us, so is NANO.
865. A new dare for you: Barrels that SING... AND... DANCE!!! They can be anywhere in your novel, in any capacity, but you must use that exact phrase with capitalization and punctuation intact.
866. Have your MC (or any other) go blind for a chapter. Knock 'em on the head, have them randomly wake up blind, whatever.
867. Have the villain use the phrase "I will kill you... WITH DEATH!"
868. May as well have a doctor called Worm.
869. Have two characters play 'Question Badminton'. They use rackets, but have no birdie. With each swing, they have to ask a question. So it's basically the question game with rackets. It's from Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, an amazing show. The fouls are: Non-sequitur, something that doesn't follow. Statement, should be obvious. Grunting, also obvious. Repetition, really obvious. You play to three. Have fun.
870. Dare: Use a typo as part of your novel.
871. Randomly insert a recipe for chocolate cake into your novel. You may have it as a separate chapter, or just randomly insert into the story, then go back to the story afterwards. If you really MUST, you are allowed to have a character read it in a book or use it for cooking cake or something, but it's better if it's just in there for no reason whatsoever.
872. Include any of the following bits of dialogue in your NaNo: You're right. You're right. I know you're right. / -I'm gonna be forty! -When? -Someday! -In eight years. / Pesto is the quiche of the eighties. / Or any other line(s) you find amusing.
873. Have a normal, sane char have neon pink hair.
874. Refer to Rammstein as much as possible.
875. Have a male char wear socks on his head.
876. Have a villiain break his nail and mumble half a day over it. Must be dramatic and evil villain.
877. Have a person wear underwear on their head. I once discovered a site, where there were pics of peeps wearing underwear on their heads.
878. But here's a new one: as an alternative for random epithets, have a character use "Holy Carp!", and if asked about it, say that they mistyped it once in a chat or something, and liked the way it sounded so have been using it ever since.
879. Have the bad guy speak in one-word sentences ("Come", "Go", "Kill", "Arrest", "Die", etc.)
880. Have a ninja perform the tea ceremony while chopping an evil robot into little bits. Or a good robot, if the ninja's evil. Can there be good ninjas?
881. Have three ninjas sitting in a room and write a chapter where they are always there, but have them restrain each other from killing anyone including each other. Maybe they took a blood oath that on the third Friday of the 11th month they will do no harm? Something like, "Oh, my esteemed friend of the Colder than Cold Death Fire, please remove your sword from my neck, as I too, am not willing to become an oath breaker just yet." And, of course, you have to write the oath. And what happens if one breaks it.
882. Use "death star" in a non-scifi or Star Wars manner.
883. I dare you to have a character using Tofu as an example of world peace.
884. Dare: Have a scene where two characters are occupied by alternately talking and reading the jokes off of penguin wrappers.
885. Anywho, my "last days dare" is to solve some problem in your book twice. Like some deus ex machina figure comes in and has a totally different solution that is also right. And uses monkeys. With spoons.
886. My more realistic dare is to have one of your characters go off on a random object in their dwelling location (or, if they have no residence and wander aimlessly and/or purposefully, something they carry with them) and describe the object's full and ancient history. (Like, this plate came from Rome, A.D. 121, and... or This parchment came from the court of Wu Ching - this could be a double bonus as you could write out what is on the parchment - in two languages if you can...) And then never mention the object again. At least, with no level of significance. Like, 10,000 words later say, "And the plate broke," or "The parchment was burned." With no pity.
887. Have an employee at a place of work answering the phone with names that are not the place of business. (i.e. He works at Blockbuster and answers it, "Peter's Pizza Palace," etc.) Something new every time. If the novel is set before (or after) the invention of the telephone or other communication of the sort, have the character say that as customer's enter the store. ("Hi, welcome to Llwelyn's Magic Supply." "But this is Gerald's Meat Market." "Whatever." But obviously time appropriate.)1. Have your main character refer to cheese at least three times, but only as a metaphor to describe another event or person
2. Have (one of) your main characters use the following phrase: "But show me a writer who, when not writing for pay, deliberately writes for fun or for self-expression, and I'll show you one of the rarest cases of freakish misapplication in the entire dime museum of human nature.”
3. Have a major character refer to another major character's "Jaunt of Terror." You can expound on this if you want, but it's probably not a good idea.
4. Have someone in your novel fall in love with the president of the United States (this is some--unknown president. He's unmarried
5. Have one of your characters go to an online school.
6. Introduce a character who plans to go to the supreme court to legally change his date of birth from January 18, 1975 to March 5, 1975...just because he feels like it. And have all the lower courts actually pass his case through.
7. Have a main character whose Indian name is Filthy Bear. He/she doesn't have to be filthy, or a bear. It's just a name. Also, if you wish, you may have a wise old tribe leader appear suddenly and give said character a long speech about the significance of this name
8. Make a cat explode in your novel for no good reason. Other possibility: have a character put a rat in a microwave just to see what happens
9. In your story, mention NaNoWriMo--only, it shouldn't be exactly NaNo as it is. It should be some twisted but still somewhat recognizable form of NaNo. Ideas I've come up with along these lines include a Reality Show about six people living in one house and trying to write 50000 words each in a month, or a pirate ship trying to obtain 50000 gold in one month, or a twist on the 'thousand cranes' origami thing featuring 50,000 cranes.
10. Have someone mention putting a popcorn bag in the microwave the wrong way (you know, THIS SIDE UP...) and then witnessing the microwave explode.
11. Write 2000 words about cooking an egg. Not eating the egg, just cooking it.
12. Have one of your characters be madly in love with Gilderoy Lockhart. They must declare it to their friends at least once in the novel. They are also completely aware that he is a fictional character, and are otherwise not crazy.
13. Include a character in your novel who can only speak gibberish. And have them say something that is vitally important for the other charactes to know, only they can't understand him/her.
14. Make reference to The Pentagon, non-dairy cheese food, the band Yo La Tengo, Glade air freshener, and failed sit-com pilots in the same paragraph. This paragraph must make sense (as must the references) and cannot occur in a dream sequence or dialog.
15. Have a character deliver the line "Forsooth! I am wholly stuck in the metaphysical toe cheese and am covered up to my scuppers!" The character cannot be insane, and this can't occur in a dream sequence, either.
16. Write an entire chapter without using the letter "e."*
17. Make a Monty Python reference at least once every 5000 words.
18. Turn on your radio to a music station. Develop a subplot around whichever song is playing.
19. Make one character constantly make reference to their dog being jealous of their cat or vice versa. for a conclusion of their randomness, have them say to the antagonist as a crucial point in the story "my cat's all huffy and puffy because my dog's litter box is bigger than his."
20. Have a character constantly pester others for jello recipes
21. Have a character obssessed with homestarrunner.com who constantly recites lines from the cartoons with zero explanation.
22. Have a random scene with a drug bust in a school cafeteria, which CANNOT be discussed later on or before. it must be just...random.
23. Have someone say "I like tomatoes..." whenever they mishear someone
24. Have an animal randomly say something. in english. it cannot be a fantasy book and your person cannot be crazy/dreaming/hearing things/etc.
25. Have a person always relating things in everyday life back to the romans
26. Have one character wear a cat collar as a bracelet, make constant references to it, then at the end, have the character give a response as to why. it cant be serious
27. In one scene have a person randomly run into the setting frantically asking if anyone has seen their chameleon. no explaining either.
28. Somewhere between 23K and 27K, have a character suddenly discover that he is closely related to a character in whom he or she is romantically interested. Your choice whether he or she stops pursuing the other or not.
29. Mention a zoo in the novel that keeps shoggoths. Optionally, show one of the characters feeding the shoggoths some penguins.
30. Have a group of people who wouldn't usually cheerlead do a cheer. For example: Yay! Rah! Roman Legion!* Lire
31. Have a character make a prank call, only to find out that they called the president and he/she is now -country here-'s most wanted.
32. Make one of your characters apply to be a contestant on the most wacky reality show you can invent
33. Have one of your characters grow pink bunnies or purple horns, or both, at some point in your novel. They can be removed eventually if you want, and they don't have to grow on the chracter's head. They can grow on the character's toes for all I care.
34. Include a talking cat named Pooky, who has pink hair. The characters will not wonder at the pink hair or at the fact that the cat talks. They will simply accept it when he says, "Hey, get me a beer, would ya?" or something like that.
35. Have a minor character attempt to cook an egg in the microwave, and get killed. I guess you could see this as an alternative to the funnier popcorn dare. ^^ Y'see, when you cook an egg in the microwave, the pressure gets built up really high and the door is blown off. Forcefully. So, if the person were standing right in front of it, it may very well cave in their skull. Yaaay! You can make it as gory and pointless as you want. It's all about the word count.
36. Put a random Buzz Lightyear doll into your story. Three times, about 5000 words apart, with no explanation as to why it is there. It just is. Occasionally, you can have it say "To Infinity, and BEYOOOND!" without anyone touching it, thus freaking out your protagonists.
37. Use the sentance: "And then we discovered that rhododendrons liked cuddling."
38. At the beginning, middle, and end of your novel your main character has to break into song. the first song: i like bread and butter (lyrics here). second song: beer barrel polka (lyrics). and third: i am the walrus (lyrics). but it can't be a dream sequence or musical setting (unless your novel is a musical, and if it is, good luck with it). preferred setting is when the main character is dealing with an authority figure of some sort.
39. Write an entire chapter from the point of view of a hamster. Feeeeeel the hamsterness
40. Have a character play either the tuba or euphonium and play in a group of tubas and euphoniums... called the Tubonium.
41. Have a minor character who thinks that he/she is a superhero. Cape is extra credit.
42. Have a character be phobic of the number four (the options are endless... no four-sided rooms, doors... possible amputation to get rid of fourth limb...)
43. Have a character with either a talking bellybutton, or who talks to their bellybutton.
44. Have a character who fights for the cause of Lightbulb Liberation!
45. Have an alarm clock that plays under the sea and then says "wake up! wake up!" that your character bought from a Korean store.
46. Have a blind character with a guide sheep. (sheep dog, anyone?)
47. Have one of your characters burst into laughter whenever they hear the word "muffin". The word "muffin" must be said several times throughout the book when the character can hear it.
48. Have a character/group of characters pass by two cops in a donut shop while one of the cops is saying, "... so she turns around and says, 'Is that a gun, or are you just happy to see me?' ... She seemed sad when I told her it was a gun and flashed my badge."
49. Make one of the antagonists in your story (major or minor) your high school English teacher. If you had multiple English teachers, use all of them!* (Sort of. I'm going to do this one with my 5th grade Reading teacher. She deserves to be in a novel.)
50. Include a cameo appearance with a major NPR figure.
51. Include a major NPR figure as a major character (Sylvia Poggioli fanfic, anyone?)
52. Include a sex scene with one or more NPR figure (Sylvia Poggioli/Carl Castle slash, anyone?)
53. I have a frog, his name is Michigan. He wants to hop through your novel.
54. Have a blind man who doesn't speak English in a wheelchair run off with your character's map while he/she is in a foreign country, leading them to meet a minor character and some girl who only knows how to say one thing in English: "Me love you long time."
55. Kill someone using a stiletto. And when I say "stiletto," I do not mean, "knife." I mean, "stiletto-heeled shoe."
56. The first line of your novel must be: "Six years later, the memory of raw fish cubes continued to haunt her."
57. In a conversation about liaisons of any kind, have a character retort, "You can liaison my ass any day."
58. Have a character who is obsessed with lightbulbs.
59. Have your first line be "Where the hell are my pants?"
60. Character A and Character B are laughing for no reason and have a piece of paper in their hand. Have [Authorative Figure] Character C walk in/approach them and ask what's going on. A and B say something about invisible ink and have to make up an explanation.
61. Begin the novel, "In retrospect, perhaps it hadn't been such a great idea to bring a nail gun to (school, work, etc.)" And then tell something tragic that resulted from the decision.
62. Start out your novel with "Jack, you asshole!" Stipulation: your main character cannot be named Jack.
63. Have a character that absolutly refuses to answer to his/her/its real name or anything similar to it.
64. Have a character coincidentally use the phrase "Mother Superior jumped the gun" in the context of a conversation, oblivious to the fact that it's a Beatles lyric. One or more other characters must make note of this, and possibly speculate on the powers of the "cultural subconscious" and/or synchronity.
65. One of my major characters works at a place called Burger Bucket. They serve burgers that are smaller than McDonald's, but larger than Krystal's, and they serve them in a bucket (a paper bucket, kinda like at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I'm thinking about six burgers fit in a bucket. For family dining, ya know?) I dare your main characters to have lunch there. If they happen to be served by a fat, balding, middle-aged, extremely friendly man named John, so much the better.
66. Have someone open up a cardboard box upside down (this side up arrow pointing down) and then its empty! Turn it right side up and open it and it's full (of whatever)! This doesn't have to be a fantasy/magic one. You could have a magic trick.
67. Have someone live through something no one could live through. A massacre, the eye of a hurricane, etc.
68. Have someone use a computer or typewriter and then realize one of the keys is missing. (Urban legend is that when the Clinton administration left the Capitol they took all the "W"'s with them)
69. Have someone break something advertised as unbreakable (like those plastic combs) and get really upset about it.
70. 3 references to sand art. That's all I ask.
71. A live chicken in a waterbed: not a dream. Imagine the havoc!
72. Have one character be addicted to Diet Coke; (s)he should go into violent rages like the Hulk whenever the vending machine runs out.
73. Encounter a monkey that wears pants
74. Have a character walk into a conversation where the following is being said without irony: "Okay, but I don't really see how that's relevant. I mean, the chocolate was one thing, but then that tractor-trailer crashed on I-80, and a thousand bananas spilled onto the highway. That can't be a coincidence."
75. If you aren't writing fantasy or historical fiction, have a character obsessed with the Victorian period who likes to wear bloomers when no one is watching.
76. Include a paragraph (or, for bonus points, a sentence) where the first letters of all the words spell out either 'antidisestablishmentarianism' or 'floccinaucinihilipilification’
77. Make a female character think that she signed the Declaration of Independence.
78. Create a religion based solely on the whims of one of your friends -- law, ethics, structure, etc. matches their viewpoints literally. Only difference, their higher power speaks to them through an action figure
79. Include a minor character that sits huddled in the corner at one point in your novel, quietly humming "la la la lallllal la" and rocking back in forth, at some point in your story
80. Or, a character that insists she was a panda in her past life.
81. Have someone mumble about the Evil Jester of Doomsville in their sleep. Whenever they sleep. Napping, coma, anything!
82. Include a short chapter in which the PoV is set in a rodent's eyes. So, include stuff like 'the cheese smelled amazing!' and 'i really need to sharpen my nails' and the like.
83. The physical description of a main character must match that of Harry Potter. Bonus for you if it's relevant at all.
84. If you were in Nano last year, mention your novel, by title of course, from last year
85. Somewhere in your book have someone mention that they are deathly afraid of chickens. There should be a reason for them saying this...
86. Explore how the chinese take-out carton symbolizes our own mortality.
87. Make every sentence alliterative.
88. Have a character get a fortune cookie containing a fortune intended for an undercover spy, bearing a secret message, and go on a long, meaningless tangent about what happened to that spy because he missed the note.
89. Write your NaNo in three parts, and name those three parts Ben is Never Home, Free Beer, and Stairwells are for lovers. Don't ask why, as it is a long story.
90. Start one of your chapters with "Meanwhile, back in communist Russia..."
91. I dare to make the spy say "..in bed and under the covers!" tacked onto whatever the cookie message is. (See #86)
92. I dare you to include a dream sequence involving the repeated failed sending of a Zipped PDF file. One of those dreams where you -have- to get something done; it's the most urgent thing EVER, but you -just can't do it-.
93. Open your novel/any chapter with, "...little did I know, he was eating glue on the other side of the door."
94. Somewhere, have someone say, "No cows! No cows!" and cover his/her head.
95. Spell out a secret message using the first letter/word of each sentence/paragraph. Like BEWARE OF SAUSAGE. I've always wanted to do something like that.
96. Name your main (or minor) characters after meat. Pastrami, salami, bologna, pepperoni....
97. Have a character dress in extremely clashing colors for the whole novel. Or, have a character dress in the same black clothing for the whole novel.
98. Kill someone using a banana peel--as with the stiletto thing, this can be done
99. Start a novel with "There once was a man from Nantucket..."
100. Someone who regularly gets hit by lightning-- no really injuries need to apply. However, they should get into a shouting match with the storm, insulting it or telling it to leave them alone... to which the storm retaliates by hitting them with lightning again. This can be dragged out/repeated as often as desired.
101. A character who has a pet Slime Mold
102. An allergy to shoes
103. Winning a contest for a trip to someplace completely undesirable. Second prize: a lifetime's supply of soda crackers... or maybe drill bits?*
104. I dare each and every one of you to take these dares you have accepted, and weave your story so that the inclusion of these esoteric items makes perfect sense.
105. At one point in the story, include a beagle named Fred who knows that he's in the story, but maintains that he can't give anything about the plot away because that would be "cheating".
106. I dare someone to write a paragraph (or two) or even a chapter if you feel rather feisty from the eyes of an animal. Just to throw things off a bit. Hell, if you're using the blown cat then you could write it from the cat's perspective and suddenly, no cat! perfect!!
107. I dare someone to have a character, male or female, who calls their private part "My Precious"
108. Have a character Alien or otherwise that only has one very large eye and is wearing a giant eye patch.
109. Have one of your main characters say (while scratched up and bloodied): "Well how was I supposed to know that cats don't like to be picked up by the tail?!"
110. Make all the lines of one character be either quotes from Star Wars or from any Monty Python movies and still have all their dialogue make perfect sense in the context of the novel
111. Kill off a character by having them mummified in toilet paper.
112. Pick somebody who's written to one of these fora, construct a biography, run with it.
113. Or, pick a nanowrimo partner, preferably someone you don't know personally, and both of you vow to include each other in your stories.
114. Include an office memo Cat! Who runs from cube to cube with sticky notes covering its body.
115. have a character who is completely obsessed with linoleum - just obsessed looking at it, though. they have to have a complete phobia of touching it, especially with exposed skin.
116. Have some dark, foreboding figure say, "Come to the dark side.....we have cookies."
117. Have a scene where the person owns an old car, and they can't get the hood up, because when it was in the mechanic's last, they left a wrench in there, and it's up against the latch, preventing it from moving. Come up with a completely unique way of getting it loose.
118. Reference Boy George in the dialogue. For no logical reason. But make it sound like it was perfectly natural for him to be referenced.
119. Include a person who randomly says different algebraic and geometric formulas, but other than that they are normal. So all of a sudden they would say "a squared plus b squared equals c squared."
120. Make a female character madly in love with a cabbage, named Jeff. She doesn't understand why her soul mate is a cabbage.
121. A character's phobia is watermelon- invent a scientific/Latin name for the phobia. make it link into his/her deep past.
122. One person does random things, as they believe that life is a dream and they are really a butterfly (This is a GREAT excuse for random things happening)
123. Someone's favorite food is masking tape
124. Use the word Milonga
125. Name a character Booty Fatpants
126. Have one of your characters be made over by The Fab Five from Queer Eye For the Straight Guy.
127. Have one of your characters to randomly grab someone and dance with them if male, or randomly be grabbed and pulled into a dance if female. So many variables! Does your character know this dance? Do the rest of the characters/watching mob grab dance partners and join? Is it il/legal/mandatory to have street dancing in your town/city/country/galaxy? If NOT on Earth, do NOT use a known dance, make one up, including name of dance!
128. Mario wants to be involved in your novel. At least three times. As a video game character, as a pizza delivery man, whatever. Just include Mario!
129. Randomly slip in paraphrased Matrix speeches. "...deja vu? Oh my god! The walls aren't the same color!" (corny, but I can't think of anything else...heh)
130. Have your characters go white water rafting. Bonus points if they go rafting on the Gauley river (I'm a bit of a rafting nut), located in WVa.
131. Include phrases like "snootchie bootchies" and "Snootch to the Nooch" or other random phrases from Jay and silent bob.
132. Have your main character break out in song every time someone says today, but the songs must be from school house rock
133. In a situation where at least three characters need to get somewhere fast but their preferred method of transportation is broken down (or died if it's a pack animal of any kind) a car/spaceship transportation vehicle/cart full of horses whips around a particularly sharp corner and the last vehicle/spaceship/horse/dragon/etc falls off a few feet from your characters, keys in the ignition/etc or fully fed and rested and ready to go. Oh, and grinning, if it's alive (as if to say "Here I am, ready to save the day!") in any shape or form.
134. Have a character be totally obsessed over a show or a comic that's unrealistic(Buffy, Dragon Ball, stuff like that), believing they are real and constantly saying things about it and the characters. Like: Whaaaa!! Save me Spiderman!
135. Include a grapefruit named Bob. His ability to talk is up to your discretion.
136. A scar in a visible place, in the shape of a tic-tac-toe board. Just think of the fun characters could have, with some washable markers....
137. Compulsive Knitting Disorder
138. A character who, through an as-yet unspecified Freak Accident, has gained the ability to project his inner monologues on those scrolling billboards. Though, of course, the character can't control this ability....
139. A hospital emergency room scene in which a bunch of clowns have gotten stuck in their tiny car
140. A character who happens to emit a signal which always sets off anti-theft systems and metal detectors, in stores, libraries, airports, courtrooms... and how he deals with this ailment (to add a twist, he can't tell anyone the truth, as he has a paranoid fear that if anyone knew the government would want to dissect him and find out how it worked)
141. Have someone mistake a fire hydrant for a murderous axe-wielding gnome...but make this somehow crucial to the story
142. Reference a secret society of something completely random, ex. - the secret society of tattoo artists, or the secret society of bag ladies
143. Have one of your characters walk by an acquaintance's computer one evening and see the following excerpt of an Instant Message conversation: 69Factorial: "okay now picture this x = -2rcos(p) + 2cos(p)/r - 2r^3cos(3p)/3; y = 6rsin(p) - 2sin(p)/r - 2r^3sin(3p)/3; z = 4log®) & the lights r dim, ok? & their r candles" HottieSquared: "hehe + my neglige is a MINIMAL SURFACE get it? lolol" the equation, if you want to know, is that of the Verrill Minimal Surface.
144. Use the concept of the California recall election in their novel, though not specifically that election.
145. Get a character drunk and in bed with somebody of the same sex.
146. New dare (more of a double dare, actually; I may do it in my novel too): Old novels would often have long "In which..." chapter titles, such as Chapter 4: In which Mr. Scrupulous attends a most unusual dinner party. Bring back this convention in your novel, but with a twist: the event referenced must always be an extremely minor one in the chapter, for example Chapter 12: In which a plate is tragically broken, or Chapter 16: In which Mr. Scrupulous drives six Mph above the speed limit.
147. Include a character who has repeated amnesia, i.e. wakes up the next morning and can't remember who they are or how they got there. This happens to them repeatedly
148. Have a minor character who has a compulsion to untie shoelaces.
149. Have a character believe that there is something wrong with the outgoing mail function of their snail mail-United States Post Office mailbox. As a result, they use other people's mailboxes and have their own reasons as to why they think it will work better than their own.
150. Make a character seem the opposite gender than what they actually are, and then towards the very end, say something that obviously shows they are their actual gender.
151. Start your chapters with pseudo-profound epigrams all quoting a single fictitious person. At the climax, when the true villain is revealed (assuming your story works this way), it turns out to be THE PERSON YOU'VE BEEN QUOTING!
152. OK, something that one of the RAs I work with (I work night security in a residence hall at the University I attend) said to one of the others last night, and which I dare one of your characters to say: "Come on, (insert other character name here). Don't you want me to beat you up for a few minutes?" Also: "Let me kick you in the balls."
153. Include a character named Josh. Include a scene with a character who tries to argue the possibility (without meeting him) that Josh is actually female.
154. Include in your book The Twelve: the Poet, the Physician, the Farmer, the Scientist, the Magician, and the other so-called gods of our legends (though gods they were)
155. Have a character order a meal at a small sidewalk café, only to be knocked down and have their food stolen by a small macaque (NOT a baboon. Make this clear). The waiter will refuse to believe them. Bonus points if it happens on a date. The scene should NOT take place anywhere macaques might normally be found.
156. If you're going to do that I also add to the dare. You should also include the phrase "I'm not even supposed to be here today." at least once. (See #129)
157. Name your characters in order of their appearance in alphabetical order, if you get to Z start over. All characters named must follow this rule, with the exception of other dares characters. Bonus points if you add the other dare named characters into the story at the right place in the order.
158. Have one of your characters get smacked in the head with something large, wooden, and heavy, go into a coma for three weeks, then wake up thinking s/he is Captain Jack Sparrow (from Pirates of the Caribbean), talking, walking, and acting like him. Then have him/her wake up into their real self in the last chapter.
159. Spend at least five hundred words on the social history, etymology, and/or proper usage of the word "shmoopy."
160. Vampire watermelon.
161. A character who, with an obsessive passion, searches everywhere for The Number of the Beast, and finds it in the most obscure places (serial numbers with 666 in the middle, or a credit card where three adjacent "clumps" of numbers began with six, etc.)
162. Have a character who will only write with quill and ink
163. Have a character who is obsessed with collecting the cap liners from pop bottles to make armor for Armageddon or some such world-ending battle.
164. Have a character who will only do/read/eat things that have something to do with the number 8.
165. Include a character, major or minor, much like Hamlet. Near the beginning the ghost of his father must tell him to avenge his death, then there must be the fake-madness, ultimately culminating in lots of Shakespearean death and...yeah. Read Hamlet, really, to know more. (It can obviously be changed to take place in modern times, etc. Bonus points if you keep the line, "Oh, I am slain!") But...this must make absolute sense. The character cannot be just really weird and obsessed with Hamlet.
166. Mention this year's novel-in-progress, in the novel-in-progress
167. I double-dog dare ya: Have a character who compulsively hordes complimentary CDs (a la AOL). He can have some intended use, or not, but his dwelling must be cluttered with tall stacks of them on every available surface.*
168. I dare someone to write their novel in a style that could be easily Rocky-Horror-ized.
169. Have your main character drop pants and moon someone!
170. Have a singing snake that can only sing in rhyme to the beat of the national anthem of whatever country it's from as one of your main characters.
171. Have someone walk into a crowded public place wearing BRIGHT GREEN velvety dance pants and be proud of the fact they're wearing them. No dream sequences either
172. Have someone sing a couple lines of a Broadway show tune every time they hear the word "pretty"
173. Have someone be in a porter potty and have the porter potty be tipped over while the character is in it. (There is actually a sign in the porter potty's that say 'Do not tip when dumping'. My brother and I were quite amused).
174. Have someone say something in Latin to people who have no idea what he/she is talking about.
175. Put me in as a character (see cameos thread) and kill me off
176. I dare to take the "word association thread" and use every word that has been given so far, in chronological order, in individual sentence.
177. Have a character's line be, "Holy __! The building's gone!!!"*
178. Include a conversation involving breakfast foods. Refer to it at least once after in your novel.
179. Have random background characters throughout the novel be acting out things from the "50 things to do when you're bored" or "50 things to do in Wal-mart" kind of list... y’know, like "stuff 50 mini marshmallows up your nose and try to sneeze them out". (I'm sure I have copies of these lists somewhere... if you want them, I can try to provide)
180. Have your character amuse themselves for a few pages by running brightly colored fall leaves through a shredder. If possible, try to write a thoughtful and deep inner monologue at this point. What the character does with the leaf-confetti afterwards is up to you....
181. Have a tv display many varieties of "ESPN's X-treme.... whatever". Bowling, laundry, frisbee, dog walking, turkey basting, grocery shopping, sleeping....
182. Have a cameo appearance or five by the Crocodile Hunter guy. Preferably chasing something odd and unlikely.
183. Have someone wearing fibre-optic jewelry. Complete with battery pack.
184. Include a short scene in which your characters are conversing while perched upon something (telephone pole, streetlamp... anything that isn't usually perched upon). Don't explain why/how they're there.
185. Grant one of your characters the awareness that he/she/it is fictional. What effect this has on his/her/its personality and mental stability is up to you, but you have to logically explain how the character became aware of his/her/its fictional status. (i.e., she was meditating and came into contact with the spirit of the author, or the author made somebody take an action that was out of character, or he discovered that when he walks out of the room there isn't anything there because the author hasn't written about it yet.)
186. I dare someone to write an entire chapter in Days of our Lives format
187. Have your character having a random cheese eating contest. They should just get up, gets some blocks of cheese and eat them. At least one of these character should be lactose intolerant (happened at college
188. Have a character convinced something is real when it clearly isn't ("Oh, look at the penguins" "What penguins?" "Those penguins, over there..." "There are on penguins!" "Are you mad, of course there are!" or "What's two plus two" "Nelson" for example, both coming from my RL...)
189. Name a chapter in your novel something completely random, like "The Pastry". Either this chapter will have absolutely nothing to do with pastry, or it'll revolve completely around pastry but have nothing to do with the rest of the novel
190. Include a long passage where the main character (who by that time should have gotten into a significant amount of trouble of some sort) wonders if maybe everything that's happening is just some stupid novel written by some idiot writer who wants to get out 50,000 words in a month.
191. Have your characters hold a 1000 word conversation where everyone only speaks in questions. No cheating and having them answer something before firing back a question in the same sentence! Pure questions.
192. Make a character have a long, meaningful conversation with a cat. This has to be at least a thousand words if not more. For fun, you can also switch to the POV of the cat and have it think disdainful thoughts at the stupid human.
193. I DARE you to have some characters watch and make comments about the movie Blue Lagoon.
194. [Include] A dwarf with no beard, or a punk dwarf... shaved head and all.
195. [Include] An Elf with multiple ear piercings.
196. [Include] A rogue with a collection of pocket frogs that croak at the WORST moments possible.
197. [Include] A knight with gay twist... his war horse wears bells on its legs, his flag has a phallic symbol on it, there are butterflies or pansies painted on his armor, things along that line
198. Mention something about the dramatic Music that will heighten the tension of a scene or scare the BGs out of people in a scene, but the characters either Never hear the music or they actually hear it and Don't know where it is coming from.
199. Have your characters only speak in song-titles for an entire chapter! It doesn't matter which ones: old, new, nursery rhymes, anything!
200. Name at least ½ your character after common objects. I.E. pencil case, monitor, crisp packet, book, glass, video, DVD
201. Have a character with a odd habit of giving everything names. Preferably the main character. "She decided that the stream looked like a Sonia. Slowly she stepped into Sonia, grimacing as her socks got yet."
202. Include a character that goes into a murderous rage every time someone uses the word "like" the wrong way. You know which way I mean. (My dad is close to being this person).
203. At least one character death in your novel must have had the following things directly involved in it: a bath sponge, a fountain pen, the Backstreet Boys, and a Yorkshire Terrier. You may choose the way in which each item is involved.
204. Anyways, a dare: Have a character who speaks in palindromes, and don't explain this or have anyone comment on it. Doesn't have to be a character with very many lines, but he might talk a lot about a race car. And you might want to name him Adam ("Madam, I'm Adam"). Here's a list if you need help. Dammit, I'm mad! Oh, and if you have the character running from drunk monks and yelling "Stop! Murder us not, tonsured rumpots!" you get a million points.
205. Many novels have pages, or even whole CHAPTERS where the author does nothing but show off how much research they did on whatever subject they're writing about, and it's extremely boring. For example, the mystery novel 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' wasted the first 100 pages or so on a very, very boring account of the art and science of bell-ringing. Moby Dick is, of course a more famous example of this phenomenon. With that in mind, I DARE YOU to insert a whole chapter or more that's just blatant exhibition of all your "research". However! This research has to either be about something extremely stupid and boring, bell-ringing or worse, or else has to be blatantly wrong. Double points if it's about something insignificant AND blatantly wrong.
206. Have a character use the phrase "Hey, baby, wanna light my pyre?" as a pick-up line. (You may change that to 'want to' for word-count purposes)
207. Have a horde of wild boxes randomly enter your story at some point. Just walk/run/whatever through the scene, making odd noises. Possibly have multiple appearances
208. Have a character that will not eat anything but Lunchables
209. Send in the plot ninjas. Literally. When the story gets to a stall, put in this, "And suddenly a group of plot ninjas bursted through the door, using their ninja stars to kill the writer's block, and left." Slight variations allowed (changing "burst through door", etc.), but you must have plot ninjas killing writer's block. This cannot be a dream or something thought of by an insane person or a writer. This cannot be referenced later in the novel, and it should not confuse the characters.
210. Include a surgery scene with a nurse or doctor that screams "CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESE!!!" randomly throughout the operation.
211. A city struck by an epidemic of exploding fire plugs. And not just exploding as in caps flying off and water shooting all over; I mean a real trinitrotoluene style explosion, with flames and smoke and all. Boom.
212. Have a female character visit an all-boys school with her mother, without knowing that it is an all-boys school, with the intent of possibly transferring there... or vice versa
213. Have a character that suffers from hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, the fear of long words. The phobia should be referred to by name frequently, in front of the character.
214. Have someone wear a shirt that says "Eschew obfuscation".
215. Have someone carrying a book of Rimbaud's poetry, and quote from it often.
216. Have a character in your story named Oscar Wilde (double cool points if it's a main character
217. Have a mad rush for a celebrity (double cool points if it's a celebrity from Lord of the Rings).
218. Write a whole scene of dialogue with one song. ONE
219. Have a character go off on deep philosophical discussions with him/herself on random stupid topics, such a 'is the grass truly green or is it all a matter of perception?' Double points if you can get it done during an extremely tense scene or an action sequence. Plus it will hopefully do wonders for word count.
220. Kill someone off with a carrot stick. The person cannot be choking on that stick.
221. Make a character develop a fetish for other peoples' feet for one chapter. He/she can lunge for someone's feet, pet them, whatever. There can be no references to the character's fetish in the rest of the chapters in the novel.
222. Quote from the following comics, at least three times. A very obvious quote: Sluggy Freelance (http://www.sluggy.com) 8 bit Theater (http://nuklearpower.com) Calvin & Hobbs (not online) Opus (or any of the spin offs. Also not online) Any of the Johnen Vasquez works (also not online)
223. Have a chat-room scene (preferably a public chat-room) where one of the people there claims to be a Sith Lord, and randomly *zaps* people when bored.
224. Have one of your character be someone from a Greek myth. They have to fit in the setting, and they can't be gods, if they are. Like Achilles, the Marine that gets on the nerves of those under him, or Hestia, the sweet homemaker.
225. Have a cybersex scene.
226. Have some kind of apocalyptic event in your story somewhere. But here's the catch. It can't take place where most of the character are. It has to be somewhere else. Like if the story takes place in France, have it happen in China.
227. Have a major fight take place in an MMORPG
228. Have one of the character's little brothers be unable to stop talking. No one cares what he says, and he doesn't care. Extra points if he says something useful (eventually! When no one's listening!)
229. Include a pyramid made out of sugar cubes
230. Quote three Simpsons or Futurama episodes
231. Have an entire chapter of discussion between the narrator and main character.
232. Have two alternate endings for you novel.
233. Have a character who only talks about discount coupons.
234. Have six characters with the same name(first and last)
235. Include the quote "Spork the muffin! Baaaanaaaanaaaa!". Bonus if you can come up with a legitimate context to put it in, instead of just as insanity.
236. Give every character in your story a name that could be either male or female. (I.e. Sam, Kim, etc.) For extra fun, say which is which as little as possible.
237. Include a convention in your story, but a convention for a group that.... wouldn't normally have one. Could be a good thing to kill word count, too.
238. Have a minor character who only appears in your novel 3 times and each time they sneak up behind someone and scream " MONKEY FEET!" and then they disappear ( make each appearance be 5,000 or more words apart.
239. Have a scene, that is not a nightmare or daydream gone bad or etc., where your main character goes to school and then realizes they don't have on pants.
240. Have a major or minor character who thinks they are a character form a soap opera.
241. Make a character fall in love with a watermelon named Ashley, can be a male or female watermelon, and then realize that they are horrified of watermelons and smash it with a sledge hammer.
242. Make someone think they are a different animal every day or every time the character is mentioned.
243. Make someone get sent to the hospital from a critical pencil or pen stab wound and then make them vow to never use a writing instrument again
244. Make a character in your story get arrested for wearing purple socks and make it make sense.
245. Make a character have violent outbursts of the sentence " Save the tadpoles!"
246. Have a complex secret society with an unknown goal figure significantly into your story. However, at the end of the book, the purpose, core members, etc. of the society are still a secret.
247. Inspired by this thread. Start each chapter with the first line of a different book.
248. Have a character who frequently uses the word "Swick" as a synonym for good or cool. This character must either a) be completely convinced that "swick" is an actual word, and the dictionary be damned! or b) must be actively lobbying the people who make the Oxford English Dictionary for inclusion of "swick" in their next edition.
249. Have your main character find a teddy bear every time that the setting changes....there could be a teddy bear left alone on a subway...a poster of a teddy bear somewhere....a real teddy bear that they pick up and take with them. there doesn’t have to be a reason for this....but just have them see teddy bears every where that they go, and then maybe start to get freaked out about it. it could even be a hallucination. what ever.....I just think that it would be funny!! and it doesn’t even have to be a teddy bear.....any object!
250. Kill off any and all characters named 'Jamie'. This may require creating characters named Jamie - preferably male. If the character is important, double points. (Variations like 'James' are only accepted if your plot is medieval or some such
251. Include an over-steeped cup/mug of tea. Make at least three mentions of it.
252. Start a chapter with "Dude. You're bleeding." Actually, start two chapters with it. Hell, start the novel that way.
253. Have a character that collects bottles of Things That Nearly Killed Them. Depending on your genre, include: quicksand, arsenic, wolfsbane, rotten food, etc. Have the bottles be a major inconvenience at least once.
254. Quote Eddie Izzard (you are my idol if you know who he is). Specifically: "Geezy Creezy!", "I'm covered in bees!", and "I'm an executive transvestite!" Also, double points if they are actually relevant to the plot.
255. Quote 006 from Goldeneye: - "She tasted like... strawberries." - "We shared everything, absolutely everything." - "You know [James]? I was always better." Once again, cool points if the quotes are actually relevant. Oh, and you should watch this movie. The villian is absolutely spectacular, and my favorite actor to boot.
256. Have a character obsessed with Lord of the Rings so badly that she dresses like a different character in every scene that she's in. Quadruple points if they dress like a Uruk-hai one day.
257. Have someone call the other person right after they've seen The Ring. *nods* Should be fun.
258. Have a scene where two people come up with as many euphemisms for sex as humanly possible.
259. For any Lemony Snicket/A Series of Unfortunate Events fans out there: I dare you to use the Sebald Code in your novel.
260. Have one character play an instrument. ..what? Really! It's that simple!
261. Use sound effects at least three times per chapter. Never use the same one twice. (This is especially hard if you divide up chapters a lot...) Bang, swish, woosh, splat, squish, wark, whatever. Use your imagination. Bonus for using "Bamf!"
262. Have a male character who would otherwise be very unlikely to read a romance novel read the most busty, brawny harlequin romance he can find in order to impress a girl. Bonus points if you describe him embarrassedly buying the book at a bookstore
263. Have all characters' surnames come from a related set of words (i.e. cities in South Dakota, plant species, etc.)
264. Have two or more characters periodically challenge each other to eating contests
265. There must be a Radioactive Taco Shack as a restaurant in your story. Your characters must go there and be served radioactive tacos/burritos/whatever and then start to glow as an aftereffect. They could start going crazy for a short while or develop phobias, both of which allow for other dares.
266. Correctly make use of the euphemism "basil-of-the-bridges". It's in the first volume, do a word search and see if you can work out what it is.
267. Mega bonus points: Steal this line- "There is no help for it; I must crucify a man who sells conserve of pomegranate-grains lacking pepper." It has to make sense in your novel... somehow...
268. Have a character be afraid of the color yellow. Due to this, they cannot drive because of yellow lights and the lines on the road
269. Have a Mullet Festival or a Mullet Pride Expo going on in the background, or just use it as a setting in one of your chapters. Guys selling shirts like "we love mullets" and "go MacGuyver."
270. NEVER use the word "wacky."
271. Every now and then insert a trio of flesh-eating squirrels.
272. Have one of your characters often go off on tangents about saving the whales.
273. Have one of your characters' fears be the 9 of Clubs (card). Whenever he or she sees this card, they feel a growing sense of taboo. It signals to them that something bad is coming...Ooooooh
274. I will forever love the person who makes use of this: A restaurant, infamous for it's famous mad steak knife which has a will of its own and kills anyone who insults the steak or the silverware or sometimes, even the restaurant itself.
275. Use the word floccinaucinihilipilification at some point in your nano. The definition is : noun. Rare. The estimation of something as valueless (encountered mainly as an example of one of the longest words in the English language)
276. Base a character off Christopher Walken. Brownie points if you can get that character to jump on a desk and dance, or fly down stairs (but don't make it silly--hopefully it'll make sense).
277. Use giant man-eating ninja cabbages in your novel. They can be giant man-eating lesbian ninja cabbages, if you want, too
278. Here's a super-dee-duper hard dare for anyone who's game. *evil grin* Base a large part of your novel (can be part of a chapter, several chapters, the whole novel, doesn't matter) on the lyrics to "Virtual Star Embryology" by J.A. Seazer: Ancient times, perfect, solitude in the desert / Air, atoms, the planet of causality / Yes, a native child / Conception / The embryo of philosophy / Egg, perfect, the origin in the nest / A stamen, a pistil, one seed / Yes, a native child / Growth / The child of philosophy / And Lunar Heaven, Mercurial Heaven, Venusian Heaven / Solar Heaven, Martian Heaven, Jovian Heaven / Saturnian Heaven, Sidereal Heaven, Motive Heaven / Further circular infinity without end / One organic system / One perpetual motion device / Ah, it is an empty movement / That is an empty movement. It is.
279. Use the line: "I still have dreams... of him getting crushed by an exercise machine over and over." When one of your characters is talking about a dearly departed.
280. I Dare your character who lives with their parents, to receive a letter from Social Security announcing the death of their mother, including paperwork to fill out to begin receiving her benefits -- with mom reading said letter over their shoulder and laughing hysterically at being thusly informed that she is dead. (plot tangent: character has to write Social Security back, informing them that mom is alive...)
281. Have at least one character (major or minor) be a swimmer, and mention them smelling like chlorine
282. Have a character read the book Grendel and hate it.
283. Have a juggler appear somewhere in the story, and spend at least a paragraph on them
284. Ask someone to lend you a random CD (as in you won't know what CD they're going to give you until it's actually in your hands), then base 500 words of your novel off of the lyrics of the third track on that CD. (Yeah, I know, this is sort of like the radio dare, but a CD usually has the lyrics to the songs in the little CD booklet, so you can reference it while you write.) Have one of your characters randomly start singing that song throughout the book. Hella good for adding random extra words!
285. Write a sentence in your novel. Take the sentence to the Google language tools page and translate it from English to French, then French to English, English to Portuguese, Portuguese to English, and so on, in and out of a few languages. Use the result as your next sentence.
286. Spend at least 1000 words debating Batman and Robin's sexuality.
287. The Skywalker Dare version two (although it's probably been done) - after your character discovers that his/her love interest is a sibling, he/she must discover that the villain is their father. And then have many highly slashy scenes involving face-caressing and helmet-removing. Or you could cancel that last bit.
288. Have a character explain the Batman/Robins canon, including anecdotes about each reincarnation (Jason, Tim) with vivid hand gestures.
289. Have a character walk up to people on the street and say "Look at my butt! Look at it! Aint it great?"
290. Give one of your character explosive diarrhoea
291. Have someone use the line "Will you let me bang my love spuds up against your dirt box?"
292. Have someone get a tin of salmon as a gift.
293. Have someone make a hole in his mattress, and get stuck in it (you know, his thingy)
294. Have a small dog fall on someone's head.
295. Have someone say, "What do you mean 'it was like that when you found it'?"
296. Have someone fart during a sex scene.
297. Have a troup of cubscouts march through your stories, who will try to sell some of your characters lottery tickets to raise funds for their annual camp.
298. At some point in your novel, a character has to fix something by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow. Preferably with some sort of sonic screwdriver.
299. Have a character eat lunch out somewhere and have their fork explode.
300. Grignr (the of The Eye of Argon fame) must make a cameo somewhere. Also, include a bollock-kicking sequence that goes on longer than the one from Argon. You know the one I'm talking about: if not, just Google "The Eye of Argon", do a search for "testicles" and read on.
301. Have character A read regularly a book of W. B. Yeats's poems in his/her toilet. Have character B, who doesn't know A well at this point, notice the book. Write him/her make conclusions about A based on the toilet-reading. Make these conclusions affect the development of the relationship between these two characters until, say, 25k. Then make A get to hear about these conclusions. And they have to start to build their relationship again from a scratch. These two must not be romantically involved.
302. Have one of your main characters eating every time they are in a scene.
303. Use this sentence: "The girls he grew up with often got excited over lip gloss, purchasing little tubes by the dozen in a variety of fruit flavors."
304. Open your email inbox, or the junk folder if filters are set up. Name a character after one of (or a combination of) the spoofed names that appear in the headings.
305. You must have a character say, "How now brown cow?". Jolly Ranchers if you use it for the first line!
306. Have a character continually reference obscure movies. Bonus points if they're obscure foreign films* (Ha! I was planning on doing this *anyway!*)
307. Kill a character's pet
308. Have a dwarf that hates caves.
309. Have an elf that is scared of the dark.
310. Have a witch with a wart on her nose but who is otherwise quite attractive.
311. Use the following quote: "Six years later, the memory of stale cheese crackers continued to haunt her." It must relate to the plot in some way--you can't just have a character randomly say it or read it or see it in a dream sequence.
312. Continually make reference to songs stuck in your main character's head. Have them somehow related to that bit of the plot.
313. Have a character that only refers to him- or herself in the third person. Bonus if you can work in a conversation between two other characters trying to figure out why he/she does this.
314. Have a male character that obsessively reads engagement / wedding announcements in a newspaper that is not from either (a) the city/town he lives in or (b) the city/town where he grew up. Make this relevant to your plot and reference it often.
315. Write a scene in which your main character does a taste test of Coke vs. Pepsi.
316. Have a character who frequently starts his or her sentences with "Well, Roger says / said..." Do not have a character in your story named Roger.
317. Have a pet in your story with multiple personalities
318. Have two major characters betting a sizable amount of money on an event not normally associated with wagers (i.e. The Grammys, a spelling bee).
319. Write a chapter where your female lead runs into every man she's ever had sex with. Bonus if you can make this seems completely natural.
320. Have a character who is stalked by someone who sends daily postcards featuring chimpanzees. Bonus points if the character has absolutely no idea who's sending them. Extra bonus points if this has absolutely nothing to do with your plot, but you work in a mention in every chapter.
321. Have one of your characters just randomly swap age groups (eg, if they are an adult, have them suddenly turn into a small child).
322. Include a boy named Chato who appears once in awhile and asks one of your main chracters if he can borrow a shirt.
323. Include Richie Rich
324. A some point in your story, the main character looks up towards the heavens, asking the gods for mercy. Hagrid is flying through the sky.
325. Make all of your characters believable, no matter how fantastic their natures, to make equal sympathies lie with the protagonists and antagonists so that neither are considered better than the other, to use absolutely no references to past or present popular media if your book is set in the real world but still make it seem just like the real world, to write a character contrary to your nature and beliefs and yet cast them in a positive light, and to make use of absurd elements and yet make your mundane elements far more noticeable and interesting. (If only, eh?)
326. Have a character obsessed with forensic science. Loves it, is great at it...and faints at the sight of blood and is allergic to fingerprint powder.
327. Include a rubber chicken that honks NOT WHEN SQUEEZED, but upon being refilled with air. Bonus points if it's in a school library where the librarian is named Theresa and her homeroom is constantly stealing the chicken and honking it out the window. No, that's not me and my friends...
328. Have a character who always contradicts him/herself, and is always caught, but just doesn't care.
329. Use the following Law & Order quote: "What's the difference between killing and murder?" "Twenty-five to life?"*
330. Use the novelist character from the last Law and Order. His name was Jeremy, I think. The episode began with him trying to work on his novel, but unable to because the guy in the next apartment had his music blaring. He finally snapped, stomped over there, and found the guy dead. He was really rude to the cops when they showed up; his girlfriend/wife explained that he was trying to work on a novel and was really frustrated. Made me think of NaNoWriMo. (Me, too, totally.)
331. Have a parakeet that mimics the phone's ring precisely. Have it lead to the characters continually picking up the phone and wondering why no one's there. Bonus points if the parakeet is only mentioned in those circumstances.
332. Have your characters go to the bathroom as they normally should. I.E. "Can I use your restroom before I leave?" Have it have nothing to do with the plot.
333. Have a character explain the theories of parallel universes for no reason. Bonus points if it's during a critical situation. Doubled bonus points if he/she includes all four levels
334. Use the word "hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian" in a sentence effectively at least twice throughout the novel
335. Have someone enter the scene with a gun and a jar and demand "Give me your soul!" Bonus points if they then offer a ribbon color of choice for the jar.
336. Have someone in your story jump up and down on their bed wearing their PJs/underwear singing rock songs badly on purpose. Without any apparent reason.
337. Have all the streets named after cigarettes and/or cigars. Variation you can include beers/wines.
338. Have your MC speak only in bad puns and/or horrible cliches for the duration of an entire conversation (say, around 500 - 750 words or so). The conversation should be important to the plot in some way.
339. Have a character that believes s/he was abducted by aliens. Panic ensues each time they see an object that slightly resembles the "probe" used on them in the ship. Bonus points if you make it a main character. Super double bonus points if the actual abduction was nothing more than a prank by the character's friends.
340. Have a character that wears a chain mail bikini. Bonus points if said bikini protects that character better than the pope's bubble car.
341. Name the MC's horse Silver, and be sure to frequently have the MC shout "Hi-ho Silver, away!" Bonus points for having a character that doesn't have a horse do this and then "gallop" around the room for no apparent reason.
342. Include a minor character named Mr. Ian Woon
343. [Have] One character discovers a 'rip in time' under their bed, and every so often something from the past, future or (for the really adventurous) a parallel universe comes flying out at the most inopportune moments
344. Have singalongs around a campfire. You must use these songs in the singalong - 'Harder To Breathe' by Maroon 5, 'Skull Tattoo' by Eagle Eye Cherry, 'Bitch' by Meredith Brooks, 'Americana' by The Offspring. And where it applies, leave the swearing in.
345. Talking about oneself in the third person is too easy. Have your self-absorbed character talk about himself in the second person. Bonus points: Have this character, a third-person-speaker, and a 'normal' person meet at a party. Massive confusion results, probably ending in a fistfight.
346. Have a male character use the following line (whether it be a pick up line or not): "There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours."
347. I dare you to not accept any dares, then explain in the novel how you're getting around doing so when technically you've already accepted mine...no word limit, just wanna see if you can talk yourself out of a box...
348. Have a character (doesn't matter how minor) that will only do something if you dare them. Such as: "Pass me the salt?" Silence. He sighed and said, "I dare you to pass me the salt." or "Oh, Great One! Please give us the knowledge we require!" Silence. He sighed and said, "Oh, Great One! I dare you to give us...."
349. Have a character who is obsessed with “the flying cats”. Actually include said cats near the end of your novel.
350. Have characters go to a Halloween party where someone is dressed as the Emperor from “The emperor’s new clothes”
351. For fellow fantasy folk out there, have a magician whose spells are invariably accompanied by the production of either a multitude of flowers (cut or growing from the ground, whichever) or a smell which would otherwise be notably out of character for the character to have around him or her (EG brawny sorcerer whose lightning spell of destruction is accompanied by the soft scent of lavender)
352. Randomly, every 5,000 words or so, go off on a 1,000 word synopsis of any episode of any TV show. It could be relevant or not, but it has to happen, and the 1,000 words don't count towards the 'every 5,000 words'.
353. Have one of your characters openly notice that their story is following a tired plot line and call a halt to it. For instance, if you are writing a horror novel, you could have your victim start to run *up* the stairs and stop, because everyone knows that is a no-no when monsters are after you.
354. Have a character that wears a twenty-foot long scarf at all times. Clarification: The scarf wearer must not: ever take it off for any reason, save washing and sleeping. Be from Gallifrey. Be named 'Tom Baker'. Know what Doctor Who is. It is also requested that they trip over the scarf at least once.
355. Include a bar with a separate menu for the most disgusting drinks ever devised. Dog turd and tonic, Pig fat and Parsley, so on and so forth. Double points if this menu causes the bar to gain in popularity, quadruple if the main character actually tries one.
356. Start every chapter with a statement that appears totally random at first, but actually finds a way to bridge into the actual plot line for the chapter. I'm doing this myself, and in fact the book will start with the sentence.
357. Have a character get stuck in a high tree early in the novel. The main character(s) promise to go get help, but get sidetracked by something more important, and so the person is left in the tree. Every 5,000 words or so, you must check back in on the guy stuck in the tree in a sort of "Meanwhile, back in the tree..." fashion and write 500 words about how he/she is doing. You have the choice to either to kill this character at the end of the novel or leave him/her sitting there forever and ever and ever and ever...
358. Have a character speak entirely in MegaHAL quotes.
359. Include a random fantasy plot in your novel - as a chapter, a subplot, or even the whole thing. Bonus points for using the first one that comes up.
360. Have a character who refuses to wear anything but purple
361. Have a character who has a recurring dream about potatoes (in some way or another) and tells his/her friend about it, who attempts to analyze it.
362. Have a male character dating a ditz who thinks that, since we eat breakfast, lunch and dinner and gain weight, if she reversed the meal order, she would lose weight. So every time he asks her out to dinner, they have to go to Denny's because that is the only place she can get breakfast in the evening.
363. Have a scene in which cheerleaders (male and female or just female) are practicing in the distance. As the main characters get closer, it should become apparent that the cheerleaders are yelling "Look! Look! Look at my crotch!"
364. Mention Torgo and his theme song. Bonus if Torgo makes multiple appearances in the novel, accompanied by his haunting theme each time.
365. Include the line "It is BALLOON!" in dialogue somewhere
366. Make frequent references to someone's "hinder" or "area." Also include a reference to a "buffalo shot."
367. Refer to KLACK skin mittens, taco mincemeat relish parfait served in a tulip glass, Polynesian cheese devils, or crust puppies. Having a character eating any of the above is worth extra.
368. Include Mr. B Natural as a main or supporting character.
369. Have a character with a fascination for either Richard Basehart, Kim Catrall, Bea Arthur, Estelle Winwood, or the Creepy Girl.
370. Have a character sing the Sandy Frank song, or at least the line "Sandy Frank! Sandy Frank! Likes to crap in his hand!"
371. Have a character with a pet lemur named Joey.
372. Have your main character walking a small dog when suddenly a very large dog runs toward them. Watching across the street are several neighbors who say "Look, that pitbull's attacking that guy/girl. Quick, get the video camera"
373. Include a character named Mark the Red, who always follows the main characters around but never says or does anything other than standing around and going wherever he is pushed (if you must know why click here)
374. Actually use an outline from this site. You may use it as a subplot, or a story-within-a-story, but extra points if it's your main plot
375. Have someone who constantly says things like "Duuude!!", "Whoah.", and "Excellent!". Have the same person do a bit of air guitar after they say it also. (Seen Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, anyone?)
376. Have a society devoted to making indestructible goldfish bowls.
377. Have this somewhere in there...By a friend...It may have been posted already. "Oh, but I was DDRing the BIOS, and the SCSI jammer just blew. So I thought I would take a shot at flaming the registry, but that just turned my word files into net speak! It'll take me a couple of days before I can go out and get a new ethernet adapter... could you just wait until then?". Doesn't have to actually make sense in any context, but bonus marks if it fits.
378. Have a couple of geeks playing D&D. However, if one dies or something, the geek playing that character dies. Eventually, all but one die.
379. Have a dramatic (optional) point in the story where a character says "..and so may you ALL!" while making some sort of dramatic motion, finger pointing, spitting, etc. Then (also optional!) have someone else break the mood by saying "Sure thing, Grendel."
380. Have at least 2 of your characters get into a debate about "Which is better, pizza or sex?" List reasons, come to a conclusion, make it an on running theme, whatever!
381. An entire conversation based around arguing about where to eat, (e.g. "Where do you want to eat?" "I don't care, you pick" "No.. you."
382. Sword fight with those plastic PVC pipes (actually works very well...)
383. Group of people who have formed an on-shore pirate ship. complete with Captain, Navigator, Assain, Flogger, Ship Wench, Cook, etc.
384. Have a character named Margaret, with the nickname, given to her by her parents at an early age, of "Miggles." A major catchphrase of hers, esp. when introducing herself, has to be, in a very cheerful bouncy voice, "I hate my life!"
385. Have a team of superheroes with the following powers: One must be able to "hold a flaming bag of garlic bread," and the other has to be able to "throw stuff kind of hard, and if that doesn't work, ram them in the nuts."
386. Have a character refer to a meal with "Let's see what crawled out of the bunghole" even if your novel has nothing to do with pirates or sailing vessels (a bung is a barrel or cask in which food is stored).
387. Have one of your main characters have an unusually small pet named Mr Jingles arcana
388. Make analogies between events in your plot/character's lives or days and large historical events (I.E. [American] Washington crossing the Delaware) at least 2 times in every chapter. arcana
389. Use the song "I touch myself" in a serious conversation between characters about self-sexuality or some such topic.
390. No novel is complete without a good bit of ritual sacrifice. So sacrifice something. A person, a chicken, a donkey, an earthworm, a cricket bat, a photograph of a wide-screen television set, Rupert Murdoch, anything.
391. At some point in your novel, it must rain frogs. Yes, I mean frogs start falling from the sky. For no apparent reason. This is important: never explain why it is raining frogs. Make it have absolutely no connection to the plot line up to this point. Your characters may take the amphibian precipitation matter-of-factly, or they may be bewildered, but don't offer any explanation for it.
392. Write about Sister Magnum Mary, undercover nun, in a novel. But not a mystery or adventure novel.
393. Have all your chapter titles be completely random and not relating to the plot whatsoever. Example - Chapter IV: Where the sky turns purple and goldfish establish a monarchy in Russia where they will rule from castles built of jellybeans. They can be as long as you want - they do count in the final word count, you know.
394. Include a character who constantly handcuffs himself/herself to objects. Chairs, telephone poles, other people, the possibilities are endless.
395. Make a character say "In the end, I was not the cabbage. The cabbage is in all of us." Make this make sense. Bonus points if you can explain it.
396. Have a girl yell at another girl, "You got salt in my ear, you WHORE!"
397. Extra points if you have this in between a conversation about how "Even though we share a room this year and have all our classes together, we always get along really well." (like in REAL LIFE)
398. There's a stranded guy on a deserted island. Every once in a while, come back to him, while he breaks his method of getting off the island and has to start over. Make them progressively more and more complicated. His last one, probably a teleporter, works, but sends him to a cabbage farm in Siberia. Make sure it's all built out of typical tropical island stuff, like sticks, palm leaves, and coconuts. Make sure he doesn't have anything to do with the plot.
399. Include all the plagues of Egypt in your novel. Bonus points for quoting this thread and/or mentioning Bush, and see if anybody gets it. Sub-dare: If you do include them all, DON'T refer to them as the seven plagues. Just have them all happen. Don't have people notice, and don't comment on it as the author.
400. Have a closet that a minor character guards with his/her life and terrified of whatever is in the closet. however, don't ever let anyone go in the closet or find out what is in the closet.
401. Have a character named Mrs. Bea Ess. This was my great-aunt's real name and she had a real sense of humor about it.
402. Have two characters, who whenever they see or talk to each other fit in a conversation about having to shave. A friend of mine and I have done this for years, we still fit it into almost every conversation we've ever had, even in emails. Don't ask me why, we just do. (examples: "Yeah, my armpit hair is almost long enough to braid..." or "I wanna shave, but I don't want to shower today.")
403. Have a surgery scene where the patient is still awake and the doctor insists upon having a conversation with them while they operate, but the patient is all worried about the surgery and the doctor is talking about something totally unrelated and/or unimportant like his golf game or the fact that he once fell asleep doing a surgery. this actually happened to me.
404. Have an assassin type character that gets caught and tries to commit suicide with a potato. whether they live or die is up to you.
405. Love Eddie Izzard, so have a character that on a regular basis blurts out 'Cake or Death!' Eventually, let it annoy another character to the point where they kill the "Cake or Death blurting character" starlighter007
406. Have all or most of your minor character's named after popular cities. Make sure no one in the story thinks they are odd names. (examples: Seattle, Eugene, Albany, etc.)
407. Throw in the word 'zesty' every 1000 words or so.
408. Oh, there is a dog on tv that always says this. it cracks me up to no end. try to work it so that your characters use it on a regular basis whenever someone is talking about how good something is, have the other character ask: "oh yeah? Is it good enough to poop on?" And always have the response be: "Oh, yes, definitely. Definitely good enough to poop on." (sorry, if it's childish, but just seems so damn funny when used in reality that I would love to hear use of it in a story)
409. Have two characters as best friends. They seem completely insane on the outside, but they really have very relevant reasons for everything they say/do. Invent sayings or phrases for your characters to use, and attach a past event to it. For example, my friend and I are much like this. We often spew out random phrases such as "COSTCO!" and "I'm going to write a letter... TO THE POPE!" and "Lactose Intolerant!"
410. Have a character refer to someone else's private part(s) as "My Precious..." The hapless other person MUST be a complete stranger.
411. Write about someone who regards NaNoWriMo as a new philosophy/way of life/cult/religion. Like "You must follow the Way of the NaNo...I am the NaNo Master...NANO NANO!"
412. Go and read Oh My Gods! Once done, include references to: REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI REIKI! / Fundie is taking a holiday. He'd very much like to appear in a book someday, and not the Bible, either. / Stuck for a religion? FISH! / Have the Pope make a http://www.ohmygods.timerift.net/strips/2002/10/20.php joke. / The invisible fairies want someone else to bother. / I SMOTE THIS STORY! / That poking stick could be a dangerous weapon in the wrong person's hands.
413. Use all (or at least most) of the movie quotes in the Movie Quote Tag thread in your novel. You can even have just one character say all of them if you want
414. Include a devil-bunny in your novel. It doesn't matter where, it doesn't matter what it's doing, it doesn't matter if it's integral to the plot. Bonus points if it manages to eat a person's toes. Extra Bonus points if it's named "Fuzzy".
415. Have your antagonist and your protagonist eat only fluffy pink socks. Bonus points if, when they finally meet, they have a thorough discussion on the finer points of Fluffy Pink Sock Cooking while engaging themselves in a fierce duel.
416. Have a cat get stuck in the ventilation system of a large building/house. Characters spend several hours trying to figure out what those banging noises are, then have to conduct a complicated rescue mission to save said cat. Having it spontaneously combust at the end like in that other dare is entirely optional.
417. Have your character diving down the road on a nice day, with the car windows open. No other car is beside him/her, and no one is seen on the side of the road. But suddenly, and inexplicably, an object flies into the car from the passenger side, and beans him/her (doesn't matter where). Have at least 300 words on the subject, including what goes through the driver's mind, and such. Have the character not find it, until later, and have the object be a red jawbreaker. The mystery is never solved. And never mentioned again in the story.
418. I dare you to have a character use outdated slang annoyingly often (at least ten times). Eg: Neato, groovy, square, cat's meow. Have them be at least a few lines apart...no fair sticking ten of them in one sentence.
419. Include a character that thinks he's a chair. Have him think no one likes him because no one will sit on him. Then, have him try different things to try to make people like him and sit on him(painting himself, wearing leather, stitching leather onto himself, etc...). Whether or not he does something that kills him is up to you.
420. One of your characters (semi-major) has to be constantly harassed by balloons. beaten, tortured, whatever. the balloons have to be inflated, of course, preferably with helium.
421. Have a character who speaks in verse. Specifically with an ABAABCD rhyme structure. Extra brownie points if the character also speaks their lines to be: 6 syllables, 6 syllables, 5 syllables, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables, 4 syllables. So you will have the character speaking: 6A 6B 5A 5A 7B 5C 4D.
422. Have a character who speaks backwards, whether the words are in reverse order or spoken as though spelled backward or both. And the other characters have to not think anything of it, except for the character's mother. But everyone else just thinks she's crazy.
423. Mention a purple mushroom cloud at any point in the story.
424. Have a character say 'You're goin' down. Down like /Florida/. And this time there ain't gonna be no recount.' *
425. Today, I randomly wandered into the dining room, and found that each of the chairs had a single, tiny, baby-sized sweater draped over it. I have NO idea why. So I dare you to have this happen in your novel, and come up with a logical explanation as to what this could mean.
426. I also dare you to have a character who never uses the word "cool" (or whatever variant) and instead refers to things as "nifty". Because nifty is the niftiest word ever.
427. Dare: "The clocks are attacking me!"
428. Include the following. 54 cats. 8 of which go by the name of Chatsworthy. All must be at least partially black. A girl who says 'Hello cow' the every one/thing she meets. This ends up getting her into trouble. A squirrel who become addicted to coke/Pepsi/lemonade. The following quotes. "KFC" "KFLee" "Candles candles candles" "Lee Lee Lee" "Why are there 100 birds in my room" "well actually there’s only 99. One took a sip of your 'orange juice' and flew into the fan"
429. Upon receiving bad news, have character X smash their cell phone in their clenched fist
430. Have character B stop in the middle of a serious conversation and say 'Hang on, I have to feed my pocket pet.
431. Have someone use body lotion in a completely non-perverted way
432. Have someone, every time they try to call out, dial a wrong number
433. Work in the line 'Shit, I got blasted."
434. Work in the line: "Wow! I've been looking everywhere for this video!"
435. Your novel must feature cheeses in the shape of people's heads
436. And to add to the last dare: And have a scene where someone is playing chess.. on a board of cheese.
437. The main character is about to duke it out with the antagonist at the side of a highway/road/street/path, both ready to do almost anything to defeat the other. They are about to charge when suddenly... a family of ducks walks between the two of them, blocking their means of getting at each other. Whenever they try to get past the ducks, they get bitten. So they're stuck. And it's a loooong line of ducks...
438. Write 100 words. In Iambic Pentameter. With the ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme(Like Shakespeare's sonnets)
439. Write 150 words. In Dactylic Hexameter. This doesn't require a rhyme scheme. (Check out a verse translation of the Aeneid of Vergil for ideas)
440. Have some characters find a very tiny pair of pants in their sofa, and spent a lot of time speculating as to what they are and where they came from. However, none of the characters should ever discuss that they might just be pants for/from a doll.
441. Have an Evil Overlord in your novel. Use items from the list, either with the Overlord successfully avoiding them, or doing them.
442. Have every chapter in your novel titled with an Anagram for NaNoWriMo. For extra bonus points, have your novel titled that way. In either case, the title should be relevant.
443. Have one of your main characters refer to this one book he or she has read every time he speaks word nerd
444. Have two or more characters discuss Extra Virgin Olive Oil in a sexual context, and in the conversation one of them does not understand the innuendos and is truly trying to convince the other(s) of the superiority of Extra Virgin Olive Oil over all other oils.
445. Have someone say about someone of the opposite sex, without any sexual meaning, "I'm not spending $20 for ONE NIGHT!" and have everyone laugh and make fun of him...
446. Every time your character picks up something electronic or tries to use it, the thing suddenly breaks or runs out of batteries. The other characters hold a seance to rid the character of this evil electronic-hating spirit.
447. At least once a chapter, have one of the main characters be called by someone who just breathes into the phone heavily for several seconds, then hangs up. OPTIONAL: Have the last two lines of the novel be along the lines of: "Geez! What is this? You've been calling me every day for two weeks! Who the hell are you?!" "My name? My name is..." THE END
448. Include "littul kittons," specially bred homicidally insane minks, in your stories. Ten extra points if you can fit in "Mother Hitton." A million extra points if you know what the heck I'm alluding to.
449. Make an important character randomly dress the drag and do the hula in the middle of a sad or important scene XD
450. Subscribe to one or more word-of-the-day lists (http://www.dictionary.com and http://www.m-w.com both offer them). Use each Word of the Day in that day's writing.
451. And I Dare you to each day, use Merriam Webster's (http://www.m-w.com) "Example Sentence" (click 'Word of the Day') in your day's writing.
452. Begin each chapter with a quote from one of the following: -Lines from poems by Hillaire Belloc {read} -Lines from poems by Rumi {read} -Lines from poems by Galway Kinnell {read} -Lines from T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats {read}
453. Choose one of the following methods of titling your chapters: -Titles of Shakespeare plays -Cards from a deck of playing cards or tarot cards (i.e. Ace of Spades or Seven of Cups or The Hermit) -Bones in the human body (i.e. Clavicle, Ulna, Radius. Bonus points if you use Coccyx) -Tube stops on the London Underground {ref} -Clues from a crossword puzzle (Bonus points for use of clues from a single crossword puzzle)
454. Choose one of the following to include in every chapter: -Lines from songs by either Elton John or David Bowie -The closing price for the NASDAQ on the day you are writing (or the previous day, if the market isn't closed yet). Just use the number, in whatever context you like. Context can vary from chapter to chapter. -A reference to an urban myth -Someone defying superstitions - walking under ladders, breaking mirrors, etc. Your choice if he or she has to suffer the consequences of doing so.
455. I call this the Knights of Ni dare: have a character than cringes and covers their ears every time they hear someone utter the word "it".
456. Have a character who is super irritating by repeatedly, excitedly interrupting others at inconvenient moments with "oh, that reminds me of when I was a child! I . . . (and then s/he tells a long story--may be interesting or boring, but is super irritating to the others). And then you can use ALL your own childhood experiences so conveniently--tragic, funny, or royally embarrassing
457. Have a character (major or minor, doesn't matter) mention NaNoWriMo at least three times in different situations, and have him/her talk about how addictive these boards are
458. The Bilbo Skywalker dare: At the final confrontation between the hero and the villain, have the villain proclaim that he is, in fact, the hero's first and second cousin, twice removed either way.
459. Work in MC Hammer as a character, somehow (extra points for multiple novelty rappers from the early 90's, such as Vanilla Ice, Sir Mix a Lot)
460. Have a very important project/assignment break (i.e. science project, proposal, etc.) and fix it with duct tape.
461. Have Bert and Ernie appear has characters (major or minor) in your novel.
462. Have your characters competing and living in the Big Brother house
463. Write at least one chapter of your book as if you were the host of a talk show and your characters are the guests.
464. Get any and/or all characters of the A-Team as cameos.
465. Include a character who is constantly reminded of episodes of The Simpsons when others are talking. They must voice their sudden recollection to everyone around them, even if it means changing the subject at hand or interrupting others. "You know, that reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons when..."
466. Books these days need more rabbits in them! Like Watership Down! So, I dare someone to put a Warren (large group) or rabbits in their story. Maybe even 50,000 of them!
467. Have any character compliment the decor of another's home/workplace. s/he then goes on a long and enthusiastic rant about how s/he went on the show "trading spaces". Do not SAY "trading spaces", but rather detail the entire process, from applying to be on the show, to meeting the designers, trading keys with a neighbor, disagreeing with the designers, all the way to finally seeing the finished room.
468. Make a character who looks completely different every time he or she walks in the room. Even if they just left a minute ago. And I mean completely different.
469. Have a character who refuses to touch the floor. Make alternate ways for them to get around, e.g., fences, furniture, people's backs.... If the character does touch the ground, make them get very upset.
470. Have a character who is generally a nice guy, yet for various reasons, is wanted dead by everyone.
471. Have a character get very emotional about duct tape.
472. Get in a long, serious discussion about the relationship between wolves and domestic dogs.
473. Have one character firmly believe that a domestic cat is a Puma.
474. Make a character randomly throw Pokemon balls at other characters and catch them.
475. Make at least 6 references to A) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy B) Anything from this website www.rathergood.com C) Shades of hair dye. (e.g., Plum Oasis, but don't use it in the context of hair dye)
476. Refer to every single book you've read in the past year at least once (not necessarily by name--you can quote it, or explain its plot--in fact it's cooler if you allude to it but omit the name).
477. Make as many fish references as humanly possible. Also, if you need to use any numbers (ages, street numbers, etc), use forty-two (which is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything according to Douglas Adams, by the by). In fact, just go ahead and make as many Douglas Adams references as you can!
478. Have sports announcers in your novel - they can be announcing a game or nothing at all - bonus points for including random statistics and using the incredibly singular patter that announcers have. rivki8699
479. Use quotes from a Corky and the Juice Pig song. Bonus points for using lyrics from Pandas, Pants, Eskimo and Remember or having the lyrics make sense. Lyrics Warning - many of these lyrics are offensive or inappropriate for children - only click on that link if you are over 18. Please keep in mind - this is a humor band and it's all parody.
480. Have two or more of your characters play a game of “dozens” - also known as “yo mama so fat.” Alternate versions appropriate to specific genres are also acceptable, e.g.: Yo dragon so ugly (fantasy) Yo laser so weak (sci-fi) Yo demon so stupid (horror) Yo heaving bosom so flat (romance) Yo tentacles so small (never mind)
481. Include a character whose name means something ridiculous in a foreign language. Only one other person in the book knows this language. S/he will start laughing hysterically when introduced to the other person. This incident should not be explained.
482. Give either your novel or chapter a title which strongly implies that you have taken up one of the other dares mentioned here, but do not use the dare in any other way. Example: “Day of the Tentacles.”*
483. Have a character with synesthesia! 1.2 The word synesthesia, meaning "joined sensation", shares a root with anesthesia, meaning "no sensation." It denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes, or experience other equally startling sensory blending whose quality seems difficult for most of us to imagine. A synesthete might describe the color, shape, and flavor of someone's voice, or music whose sound looks like "shards of glass," a scintillation of jagged, colored triangles moving in the visual field. Or, seeing the color red, a synesthete might detect the "scent" of red as well. The experience is frequently projected outside the individual, rather than being an image in the mind's eye. I currently estimate that ½5,000 individuals is born to a world where one sensation involuntarily conjures up others, sometimes all five clashing together (Cytowic, 1989, 1993). http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
484. [Include] A little man who only says "dorf."
485. Have one of your characters talk like Mojo Jojo from the Powerpuff Girls. The evil purple-brain-hat monkey from that Cartoon Network cartoon about three superhero triplets. The one who repeats and says everything over and over again; sometimes he rephrases but basically what he's saying is the same thing. The same idea is being conveyed no matter what he's saying. He's trying to tell you the same thing, just in different ways. He makes it all different, to make it interesting. He wants his speech to be unique, so it will stand out. He wants to make it so that he can add more words. He wants to speak more about the subject, especially since you are supposed to write 50k for NaNoWriMo. You have to write a 50k novel for NaNoWriMo. National Novel Writing Month, which is about writing a 50k novel during the month of November, the 11th month. And you need 50k worth of words, you need that many to win, to be successful, to rule the world. And a character like Mojo Jojo, the monkey who turned out to be the Powerpuff Girls' father in a way, not really technically, but somehow he is, through a plot twist, which is also good for NaNoWrimo, will make it good for NaNoWriMo...
486. Have a character who is addicted to smelling markers - not the really big ones (I think they're called magnums), but the ones for kids that never smell like they're supposed to.
487. Have a character who is obsessed with Star Trek and whose dialogue consists of nothing but Star Trek quotes. Extra fifty points if he's a somewhat important character.
488. Have a character totally convinced that Microsoft is planning to take over the world using the paperclip shaped Office Assistant. S/he will try convincing others of the scheme throughout the novel. Bonus points if s/he's right about it. (And we all know s/he is. Double bonus points if this is important to the plot in any way.
489. I dare you to have at least one passage of dialogue in your novel where everything the characters say has a double connotation. IE: "I don't do it enough." Etc...I'm sure your imagination will serve you well. Bonus points if you leave what they're talking about ambiguous.
490. Have a character who is dark and sinister looking; dresses in black, wears chains and spikes and leather, has a deep, slow, voice... you know, typical Goth. Then have all the other characters refer to him as "Happy Sparkle Unicorn Rainbow Puffy Cloud Pants" or something similar. Your choice as the whether the character really is sinister. Also your choice as to whether the character is irritated by his "nickname".
491. Snub your main character for at least a chapter (or equivalent) by, say, ignoring him/her when counting people in the room (IE if there are three people present write as if there were two) and have other characters either ignore or brutally disprove anything he/she says
492. Include a character named Captain Obvious (your choice as to whether this is a superhero, someone who dresses up like one, a military officer...) who shows up and explains the plot at least five times. This can be completely random or completely integrated into your plot.
493. Have a certain item - a hat, for example - that causes people who are wearing it or holding it to have a certain opinion or trait - conservatism, liberalism, bursting into song, whatever. Don't explain it or let your characters figure it out - just have it show up several times and do its work.
494. Somehow work in the address of every place you have ever lived. If you lived in 4 dorms in college that counts as four separate addresses.
495. I dare you to name a character Crista Galli or Glen O'Humeral. (Sounds like I've got a one track mind - anatomy!)
496. Name all of your chapters after headlines from The Onion. The titles could directly relate to the content of the chapter, or they could be completely off by a million miles, it doesn't matter. Just use them! For example, you could have Chapter 5: Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs: 'Oh, Shit,' Says Humanity, Chapter 9: Hostel-Dwelling Swede Getting Laid Big-Time or Chapter 13: Schwarzenegger Elected First Horseman Of The Apocalypse.
497. Have one character (minor, major, doesn't matter) answer a serious question by shouting "GREYHOUNDS!" Do not have them then answer the question, or elaborate in any way.
498. Have a random background character running around yelling "He cannot see man! He cannot see!" at the top of his or her lungs.
499. Name all the important buildings in your novel after characters from TV shows, such as 'The B.A. Barracus Memorial Hall'. Bonus points for the 'Joey Tribbiani Psyche Ward'.
500. Have one character wear odd socks for the duration of the novel, if time passes, have them in different colored odd socks, but always mismatched. Draw attention to it at least three times, but it should have no bearing on plot, and never be explained.