Shannon Fallon

One of the features I use the most in Scrivener is the word count functionality. Sure, Microsoft Word and Google Docs will both tell you how many words are in your document, but Scrivener really takes it to another level. I’m going to be showing off my favorites and giving suggestions for how you can make use of them yourself.

Here in Scrivener’s Project Statistics (accessible under the Project menu), you can see word and character counts for your manuscripts. The statistics for Scrivener 1 are shown on the left and statistics for Scrivener 3 on the right. As you can see, Scrivener 3 contains additional data, including paragraph and sentence counts and the average length of each. Both show an estimated page count.

Under Options, you can change how many words should be counted as a page, as well as what should be counted as part of the manuscript. This means you can have extra sections, like a reader’s guide for pronunciations and definitions of fantasy words, without having to manually subtract the word count for them while trying to determine how long the actual text of your novel is. You can also easily highlight a selection of scenes or chapters to see how long just those are, which can be particularly helpful if you’re trying to find chapters that are longer or shorter than the others or find out if you’re spending too much time on the exposition, a particular sub-plot, etc.

You can also set word count goals for each scene, which you can set ahead of time if you’re writing a first draft and have an idea of how long you want it to be or after the fact if you’re revising. Personally, I use this to set a maximum number of words because I have a problem with expanding while I revise. Having something like this helps me keep the writing under control, by forcing me to go back and take out the sentences and words that aren’t really serving a purpose. This can be edited at the bottom of every text by clicking on the little circle at the bottom right-hand corner in Scrivener 1 (shown beside the green progress bar in the image above) or clicking on the green bar in Scrivener 3.

If you like goal setting, you can really take it all the way with the Project Targets window, one more option to be found under the Project menu. Here, you can set a target word count for your entire manuscript, as well as for your session (which starts when you open the program and continues until you close it in Scrivener 1 or resets daily in Scrivener 3, unless you choose to change the settings or click Reset). For everyone who likes to target a certain number of words per day, this is an excellent option. For people like me, it will even count backwards as I try to push my manuscript back down to 120,000 words or less following my latest round of revisions!

All of these are little things, but I find that they really improve my writing experience. If you have Scrivener and haven’t explored it fully, I hope I’ve helped you find some new features to try. If you have, feel free to leave a comment about how you make use of these. Everybody has a different process, but I’m sure we can all learn something from each other.

Happy writing!