Saturday, March 7, 2009

Another Advantage of Scrivener

I've blogged before about the advantages of using Scrivener. I found another one today: no page count. As you write, the running tally on the bottom of the screen is for words, not pages. And it's words per chapter, not per project (unless you go in and change the settings). And I suck at numbers so much that I can't really look at word counts of multiple chapters and figure out what's really going on. I've just been typing away, hoping that what I end up with looks like a book.

So today I decided to see just how close all this work I've been doing actually does look like a book, so I transferred it all to Word. And all those words add up to 50 pages. I hadn't even noticed. I usually really care about hitting the 50 page mark.

But I've been more focused on writing the words than on the word count...and that's a much better way to write.

4 comments:

Heather Zundel said...

Oh that's awesome Beth. I can't wait to turn to the "white side" and get a Mac. Of course, a new job to pay for that might help, but it's gonna happen. And then Scrivner's, here I come!

Robyn Campbell said...

I know how you love Scrivener. But that does sound nice! I wanna get a Mac. It's in line for all the other, I wanna get that, stuff. Hmm, that sentence isn't grammatically correct. But it's how I feel. :)

PJ Hoover said...

When writing, I focus a ton on word count. Not so much pages. I normally have a word count goal for the day and try to exceed that.

Unknown said...

Heather: *srsh* Welcome to the white side. *shrsh*

Robyn: Trust me, I totally understand!!! I really really really want a Mac desktop...but the one I want is $1600!!! So, er...totally not happening any time soon.

PJ: I've never really looked at word count--I used to set ten-page-a-day goals. Right now, the best thing about the running word count is the fact that I don't understand a thing about numbers. I'm writing much more sparingly--which means, I hope, much less cutting later!