I have a REALLY long manuscript I’m trying to determine whether I should cut into two novels. I’d like to find the midway point and just see where that puts me, if it’ll be a good place to split. But I’d like to know the word count at that midway point. Is there a way to do this? I can highlight all the words and scroll down until I reach midway, but that will take forever. Wondering if there’s an easier way. Thanks!
If your way-long manuscript is a single document in Scrivener, then you have definitely not been taking advantage of many of Scrivener’s most wonderful features! (I am guessing you wrote this text in some other software and have now brought it over into scrivener.)
Just place your cursor at the relevant point in your manuscript and use the Split command. Voila! Your manuscript is now split into two documents-- each with its own word count, of course.
You could put those two documents right back together with the Merge function, but it is important to realize that you do not have to do that – even if you decide that is not the point at which you will break it into two volumes. When you Compile your manuscript for output, Scrivener stitches things together for you anyway – by default whatever docs are sitting in the Draft/Manuscript folder. So, you can split your manuscript into as many document pieces as is convenient for you when working with it. People commonly split their texts up into documents by scene, but many Scrivener users cut them even finer. Doing this gives you easy, quick access to any part of your manuscript, because all the parts of your story are represented in the binder so you can easily jump to the part you want.
At the same time, Scrivener lets you look at your story (or any part of your story) as one seamless whole anytime you want using the Scrivenings view mode.
I recommend you explore these features of Scrivener. It is a whole new, beautiful world for your writing life!
UPDATE: Or maybe you didn’t mean it was all one doc in Scriv. As long as there is a document break at the relevant point, you can use Scrivenings view mode to get a quick word count – just select the relevant subset of docs in the binder and go into Scrivenings mode. All the involved text will load into the editir and the word count that shows there will be the count of that composite text. Alternatively, yiu can see word counts in Outline view and can have folders of docs show word count subtotals, so if yiur candidate parts were placed in separate folders, you would be seeing the word count subtotals you are looking for.
gr
P.S. Never click and drag to select a great deal of text. Click at the start point. Then just shift-click at the endpoint to select the swath. (Or vice versa, click at the endpoint, then just shift-click at the starting point.)
The word count of the selection is displayed in the window status bar. (Scrivener oddly calls this the “footer view”.) Make sure View > Editor Layout > Show Footer View is enabled to see it.
Place the cursor at your decided midway point, then press ⇧⌘↑ to select everything to the beginning of the document.
No need to select scads of text, just click into a word somewhere in your document, then right-click and have a look at the Writing Tools submenu, you should see something like this:
Notes:
Do not actually select the word where you right - click, otherwise you’ll see something like “1 of 5392”
Also, be sure the insertion point is actually in a word - I’ve found that if it’s at the end of a paragraph then I see “0 of 5392”