Okay, you did all your planning, blah blah blah (see my articles over the last six days – you are clipping these to Evernote, right?), now Let’s write.
You should have entered your project target word count in Scrivener, and your session word count already. If not, press your CTRL button and your comma button (,) at the same time. The target screen opens up. I leave that open, because seeing the little session target grow longer and change colors begins to be an inspiration to keep writing.
If you’re writing a novel, your target should be 85,000. Fantasy, Sci Fi and more action oriented stuff such as techno-drama have higher word counts. I tend to set mine at 150,000 – but lately I’ve been working very hard at changing that. Set it at 110,000 to 120,000.
It doesn’t matter what genre you’re on, the target for the day is going to be the same number. 1667.
That’s really nothing. If you’re writing for two hours, that’s easy. 90 minutes, a little tougher. Learn to utilize your full screen mode in Scrivener.
Going through my first novel, I’ve split up my scenes into four groups…
Action snippets are 400 words. (an action snippet are those short, one paragraph sections that usually follow one another and are a tool to show building tension, leading to something – Clancy did this a LOT).
Short scenes, 600 words.
Medium scenes, 900 words.
Long scenes, 1,200 words.
Four action snippets, and you hit your word count for the day. Really. Since action snippets usually are about 8-10 following each other, you can find in one night of writing that you’re jumping WAY ahead!
Your goal of writing should be the magic 1,667 words a day. That’s 50,000 words in one month. Your novel is half done.
No kidding.
If you haven’t done this yet, go through each individual scenes (30 chapters of 7 scenes each) and enter in your estimated word count, and be prepared to revise. I’d set all of them at 1200 for now, and if you know it’s going to be a snippet or short scene, revise the count.
At the bottom of the page in Scrivener is a little black and white archery target. Click that. The target word count will pop up, and enter in your number. You only need to type the first two numbers because a zero is already there (40 yields a number of 400). If you revise it, you’ll have to type the entire number. But for now, I just saved you a lot of time.
It takes probably about 45 minutes to go through a novel and enter in document targets.
WRITE!
