I’m very much an amateur wordsmith and have probably spent more time reading about how to write than actually writing. What everyone agrees on is the need to actually write and I have found project targets helpful in this regard. However, picture the scene as a struggling trainee writer’s mind goes as blank as the page he is working on: no 1,000 words today. Would it not be possible to have not a document/scene target, not a project target, but a general usage of Scrivener target, be it in a journal, a project, a blog or whatever else Scrivener is being used for.
For myself, I have four projects live at any one time and would be grateful to see the sum of their progress without taking out a calculator and be able to switch between them as the fancy takes me; all the while having a running tally of words entered for the day.
That would be very difficult to achieve technically, because projects are isolated, discrete entities. The only way of doing it would be for Scrivener to search for every .scriv file on your machine, load them up and count all of their words - which could take quite a long time. Otherwise you might copy a project from somewhere else which it has no idea about and so wouldn’t take account of its words.
All the best,
Keith
I see the problem. Please consider instead a global target per single folder of projects. For myself, I keep everything in a Dropbox folder with backups to a local folder on a Mac. Allow the user to specify on a per project basis whether the project is to be included in the global total.
In any event, thank you for considering the problem.
As an alternative, might I suggest tracking this on the user side?
Create a single “Things I’m Writing” project, with separate folders for the book, the journal, the screenplay, whatever. Set whatever targets you like.
At whatever interval seems appropriate, drag “rough draft” material from this project into the more focused projects for individual end products.
As a somewhat more experienced writer, I would also like to gently suggest that developing the ability to focus on a single project for at least long enough to finish it is important, too.
Katherine
Many thanks for both a workable solution and the “gentle advice”.