How to Increase Your Word Count

1. Add description. Be it physical details of your characters' appearance, or the features of a breathtaking landscape that the characters must ride through, adding description will not only increase your word count, but it will also add meat to the scene.
2. Show what your character is thinking. Don't just have your character shrug and continue on his quest. Let him have the chance to think about what has been happening to him, and why he is going to take a certain course now.
3. Let characters talk to each other. It's okay to let your characters talk. Let them ask each other questions, instead of blindly moving together through their quest without ever even introducing themselves.
4. Throw in a random encounter. Are your characters in a jungle? Throw an ancient jaguar warlock at them. Or do they need to hurry through the busy streets in order to get to work in time to close a major deal (and thus save their jobs)? Let them stumble into an old school rival that is simply determined to make amends right now.
5. Make something go wrong. The bridge brakes, sending our heros plummeting down the mountain toward an early demise. A vital letter gets sent to the wrong house, and so the main character leaves the country thinking everything they loved has been lost. How will things turn around from here?
6. Show what happened during that skipped scene. Did you really need to skip over the meeting with the royal sorcerer, in which our might hero received his magic dagger that is destined to slay the horrendous hippogriff?
7. Build up the world. What is the world of your story like? Can your readers read through the story and imagine the characters being at a mall or in the middle of a forest, without either setting being unfitting based on what they have been given about the actual setting? Let your reader see the setting unfold on the page, and firmly settle itself in their mind as the only possible place the characters could be.
8. Explain how the mystery was solved. The "what happened's" and "whodunit's' have been solved, but how? If the character hasn't given a good reason for how they figured it out, now is the time to write it in.
9. Make things interesting. Sometimes, all you really need to do is add some flesh to the scenes you've already written. Take a simple exchange of dialog, and reveal what the characters were doing during their conversation.
10. Just keep writing. It doesn't have to be perfect right now (because you'll probably edit it at least twice), but get those words written. Amid the ramblings, you might find nuggets worth polishing into a story to be treasured.