Writing Goals & Sessions
Writing goals keep you accountable: set a target, write, and watch the progress bar fill. Scriptorium tracks your output automatically — no manual logging.
Creating a goal
Section titled “Creating a goal”Open Goals in the Tools panel and create a goal:
- Goal type:
- Daily words — write n words each day
- Total words — reach a cumulative word count (e.g. 80,000 for the draft)
- Scope — link the goal to specific manuscripts. Link a parent (say, the whole Manuscript folder or an Act) and everything inside it counts automatically.
- Start date, and an optional end date (deadline).
- Days off — exclude specific dates from a daily goal, guilt-free.
How progress is tracked
Section titled “How progress is tracked”- Every time a manuscript saves (which happens continuously as you type), Scriptorium records the words added and deleted for that manuscript that day.
- Deleting text never counts against you — a heavy revision day where you cut 500 words and wrote 300 counts as 300 words written.
- Progress shows as a bar with a percentage, and you get a notification the moment you first hit a goal.
See how words are counted below.
Notes and entities are tracked separately
Section titled “Notes and entities are tracked separately”Words you write in a note or an entity are tracked too — open Statistics on that document’s panel to see them, with the same breakdown of typed, pasted, AI-generated and dictated words that a manuscript gets.
They are kept apart from your book’s numbers, on purpose:
- Your project’s word count means manuscript words. Writing two thousand words of character notes never moves your novel’s count, the toolbar figure, or a goal’s progress bar — even if you keep those notes inside your manuscript folder.
- Goals are manuscript-only. A goal is a commitment about a book; notes accumulate as a side effect of writing one, so you can’t link a goal to one.
- Version history is manuscript-only as well. Notes and entities still have Trash, undo, and the full project backup behind them.
Goal history
Section titled “Goal history”Each goal has an expandable history: a day-by-day calendar showing which days you hit the target, missed it, or are still ongoing. Perfect for keeping a streak honest.
What counts as a word
Section titled “What counts as a word”Word counts include your prose — paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, list items, links, and tables — and exclude footnotes, images, and code blocks. The toolbar count for a manuscript includes all its nested children.
For a note or an entity, the count is of the document body. Text you type into template properties — a character’s height, a location’s ruler — is not counted.