<p><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-29-43.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-29-43-tm.jpg" width="250" height="215" alt="Screen shot 2010-02-17 at 16.29.43.png" style="float:right;padding-left:4px;" /></a>I wrote about the subject of word counts yesterday. Keeping tally of how much you're writing is vitally important in any project. You don't just need to know how productive you're being. You also have to be able to judge the progress of the narrative as the story builds. Rhythm is important in any book, and measuring that rhythm demands that you know whereabouts you are. Being able to say very accurately this scene happens around the 50,000 word mark can be amazingly helpful.</p>
<p>It's also decidedly difficult to get that information out of most word processors. Scrivener, of course, isn't most word processors. So let's look at how it's different.</p>
<!--more--><p>The first new trick up its sleeve is the target box seen at the top of this story. This lets you set a target for the entire book -- here 110,000 words. And a target for the current session. The overall target shows you a bar indicating how far you are towards the planned end of the project. The bottom one stays red until you hit the session target word count you've set yourself, after which it turns a comforting green.</p>
<p>You can use these things as a blunt 'I've written my 1500 words and now I'm done' tool. But it's also worth bearing in mind that the session target also takes into account words you've cut out too. So if you say to yourself I want to slash a couple of thousand words from the piece it will measure that as well. As I will say here repeatedly, what matters is not the rising word count but the sense that a project is under control, growing and alive. It can be in that state just as much with a falling word count as a rising one. In fact if you simply hammer out a target word count every day and keep adding to that my guess is you ought to be asking yourself what's wrong.</p>
<p><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-53-18.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-53-18-tm.jpg" width="250" height="131" alt="Screen shot 2010-02-17 at 16.53.18.png" style="float:right;padding-left:4px;" /></a>The overall word target is important of course. But you also want to know long individual scenes and sections are. It's dead easy to do this in Scrivener. Here's a single scene from <i>The Blue Demon.</i> As you can see there's a precise word count at the foot of the screen. All I have to do to get it is select the individual scene document in the binder on the left. That's it.</p>
<p><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-53-02.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-16-53-02-tm.jpg" width="250" height="136" alt="Screen shot 2010-02-17 at 16.53.02.png" style="float:right;padding-left:4px;" /></a>A similar idea will get you a word count for the entire section of scenes contained in the folder. Select the folder itself and Scrivener adds up the individual word counts for each of the scene it contains. Here you can see that section two in the book comes to 19,604 words. About what I'd been planning on for most of the sections in this story.</p>
<p>What you don't get -- or if you can find it, I haven't -- is some indication of progress throughout the book. There is a visual way you can achieve this though. Option-select the top icon in the binder (usually called Manuscript or something). Or select it and click 'Edit Scrivenings'. This will show you the entire book in one go -- much as it would appear in Word. This feature is one thing that sets Scrivener apart from many of its storywriting peers. Lots will let you write in separate scenes. Not many let you see them linked together like this. Scrolling through will give you a word processor style view of the story, though I haven't found a way in which you can stick your cursor into any part in this view and say -- now I am 62,000 words. If that kind of control is important you then maybe you should consider putting a word count in a note at the start of each section - 'At this point we're at 43,000 words' for example.</p>
<p>Here's how <i>The Blue Demon</i> draft looks in that view. This was my first book written completely in Scrivener. Now I can't imagine working without it.</p>
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<a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-17-00-38.png"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/screen-shot-2010-02-17-at-17-00-38-tm.jpg" width="480" height="499" alt="Screen shot 2010-02-17 at 17.00.38.png" /></a></p>