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Using Scrivener Progress Tracking to Finish Your Novel

This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series What Works For Me

When I asked more expe­ri­enced authors for advice, the most fre­quent tid­bit I received was: focus on fin­ish­ing your book. Writ­ing a book, like every project, requires being con­sis­tent, keep­ing up a sched­ule, and pro­gress­ing lit­tle by lit­tle every day. It’s about dili­gence and hold­ing your­self account­able. But, how do you keep up the pace in the face of some­thing so seem­ing­ly daunt­ing? Set­ting dai­ly reminders, track­ing progress in an Excel sheet, or using oth­er hard and fast meth­ods does­n’t work well for me as it’s just more to keep up with. As a trained soft­ware engi­neer, I believe in automat­ing as much as pos­si­ble so that I can focus on what matters—writing. This is where Scriven­er, pos­si­bly the most impor­tant tool in my kit, comes into play.

Pictured: My life before Scrivener.
Pic­tured: My life before Scrivener.

I start­ed using Scriven­er eight years ago. To this day, no oth­er writ­ing soft­ware comes close (and believe me, I’ve tried many of them). Aside from plot out­lin­ing, dis­trac­tion-free mode, and man­u­script com­pi­la­tion into sev­er­al for­mats (eBook, PDF, Word, etc.), Scriven­er also includes sev­er­al tools you can use to set goals and track progress. You can see the entire his­to­ry of your draft and rem­i­nisce on its ear­li­est begin­nings. So, in the hopes that oth­er writ­ers will find this as use­ful as it was for me, here are the Scriven­er fea­tures that helped me fin­ish my book once and for all.

Project targets

Project tar­gets allow us to set a tar­get word count for our draft and a dead­line to fin­ish it. Once in Scriven­er, head to Project > Show project tar­gets… in the main menu to open this pop-up:

Project targets pop-up in Scrivener.

There are two types of tar­gets here:

  1. Man­u­script Tar­get — this is the tar­get word count of our entire manuscript.
  2. Ses­sion Tar­get — input the tar­get for each writ­ing ses­sion. How much are we tar­get­ing to write per day? 800 words? 3,000?

As you can see in the pop-up, I have already set my man­u­script tar­get to 92,000 words, but you can click on the num­ber to set your own tar­get for your book. The green progress bar will fill in as you write towards your goal. We can cus­tomize even more by click­ing the Options… button.

Draft target customization in Scrivener.
  1. Dead­line — when are we plan­ning to fin­ish our book? The most effec­tive way to com­plete a man­u­script is to set a deadline.

Next, we can click on the Ses­sion Tar­get tab to con­fig­ure our dai­ly writ­ing sessions.

Session target customization in Scrivener.
  1. Reset ses­sion count — when should the word count of our cur­rent ses­sion reset? We can reset it based on the time of day, when we close the doc­u­ment, etc. This will help us plan for con­tin­u­al writ­ing goals.
  2. Writ­ing days — which days are we plan­ning to write?

Once set, we can check the progress of our man­u­script in Scriven­er by hov­er­ing over the search bar to start real­ly feel­ing the pressure.

Draft progress bar in Scrivener.

Document snapshots and targets

We can man­age goals at a more gran­u­lar lev­el by set­ting spe­cif­ic tar­gets per doc­u­ment. For exam­ple, if we have an idea of how long chap­ters should be, that tar­get can be not­ed and tracked. This is a great way to bet­ter plan the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the man­u­script con­tent. While edit­ing a doc­u­ment, the tar­gets pop-up can be launched by click­ing on the small progress bar at the bot­tom-right cor­ner of the Scriven­er window.

Document word count target in Scrivener.
  1. Doc­u­ment progress — the green bar at the bot­tom of the screen shows how much we’ve writ­ten. Dou­ble-click it to set targets.
  2. Doc­u­ment tar­get word count — what’s our word count goal for this document?

Aside from progress track­ing, Scriven­er also con­tains draft his­to­ry and ver­sion­ing fea­tures. We can take snap­shots of doc­u­ments to man­age mul­ti­ple ver­sions and set a sta­tus (draft, revised draft, final, etc.).

The snap­shot pan­el is in the inspec­tor (usu­al­ly locat­ed on the right side of the edi­tor) and lists our snap­shots along with their date and sta­tus. We can also take new snap­shots from this window.

Document snapshots in Scrivener.
  1. Snap­shots tab — click to see snapshots.
  2. Com­pare — com­pare the select­ed snap­shot with the cur­rent version.
  3. Roll back — revert to a pre­vi­ous snapshot.
  4. Snap­shots list — view pre­vi­ous snapshots.
  5. Doc­u­ment sta­tus — set the sta­tus of the cur­rent document.

Per­son­al­ly, I find the snap­shots fea­ture to be a very effec­tive nos­tal­gia induc­er. I rec­om­mend tak­ing snap­shots fre­quent­ly to save pri­or work and review it lat­er if you need a hint of inspi­ra­tion or a con­fi­dence boost to see how far you’ve come.

Writing history tracking

The Writ­ing His­to­ry fea­ture is Scriven­er’s equiv­a­lent to peer pres­sure, and it’s by far the application’s best unin­tend­ed hid­den secret. By default, Scriven­er keeps a log of how many words we’ve writ­ten per day, and it’s avail­able for us to check how con­sis­tent we’ve real­ly been. Few writ­ers know of this fea­ture. For me, it was as big a rev­e­la­tion as Pro­cre­ate’s replay fea­ture, which keeps track of all your actions while draw­ing and lets you export a time-lapse video of your art. In Scriven­er, head to Project > Writ­ing his­to­ry… to check your stats.

Writing history pop-up in Scrivener.
  1. Writ­ing days — the total days we’ve writ­ten in Scriven­er since the begin­ning of time.
  2. Aver­age words writ­ten per day — words writ­ten per day in drafts and oth­er documents.
  3. Time peri­od selec­tion — see his­to­ry by day, month, or year.
  4. His­to­ry table — the actu­al writ­ing his­to­ry summary.

I did­n’t real­ize this fea­ture exist­ed until lat­er on in the process of writ­ing Goliath Fall­en, dur­ing The Big Rewrite of 2021 when I had cut about a third of my man­u­script. The writ­ing his­to­ry track­er helped me visu­al­ize how much con­tent I had removed per day.

Conclusion

And there you have it! These are the Scriven­er fea­tures I have found most use­ful for hold­ing myself account­able to write con­sis­tent­ly and even­tu­al­ly fin­ish my nov­el. I hope this has helped you real­ize the val­ue of Scriven­er and bet­ter nav­i­gate its many use­ful fea­tures. If you run into any trou­ble or have any ques­tions or com­ments on Scriven­er, please let me know in the com­ment sec­tion below or via email. I’m hap­py to help!

One last thing before I go—as a writer and a soft­ware engi­neer, I’d like to send a big shout-out to the folks at Lit­er­a­ture & Lat­te, Scriven­er’s devel­op­ers. You’ve pro­duced an incred­i­ble prod­uct, and I would­n’t have been able to fin­ish my book with­out you. Keep up the great work!

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