I draft in Scrivener, which allows me to set target word lengths for each scene within a chapter. Below I've expanded the Excel spreadsheet from Journal Entry No. 1, to calculate the word length for each chapter and scene, all based on the treatment. THESE ARE ALL TARGETS AND THEY WILL CHANGE, BUT THIS ANAL WORK PROVIDES A FOUNDATION AND DIRECTION. The closer I stay to it, the closer I will arrive at my target book length.
The table below shows that there are 17 chapters of lengths 3250 to 4500 words. There are 63 scenes of lengths 500 to 4500, the 4500 scene filling an entire chapter (9). The average scene length being only 1143 words. The final manuscript target length being 72,000 words.
The "0" cells compare two different ways to calculate the word counts so they add up to 72,000. If one of the "0" cells does not show a "0" I know one of my calculations is wrong. Notice the chapter breaks favor the length of the chapter and not the end of one of the 21 macro beats (grey).
The green lines represent the backstory, flashbacks discussed in Journal Entry No. 2— notice the FB scenes are very short, as flashbacks should be.
Everyday when I think through this stuff I imagine a revision to the treatment or micro beats. I make notes of those in the treatment, which I will be following as I write. In fact, when I write a scene, I'll copy the treatment paragraphs for that scene and paste them into the Scrivener document, which gives me beginning copy for that scene. For instance just before starting this journal entry I copied the treatment paragraph for Chapter 1 Scene 1 into Scrivener. I have the target for that scene set to 1,000 words. The treatment paragraphs were only 275 words. That gets me going and I started to rewrite and expand.
Here's what the Scrivener Binder (left margin) looks like for the first four chapters and 12 scenes.
Each one of those 12 scenes (text documents) has a word length target set for it. As I write, a growth bar appears at the bottom of my manuscript page in blue. When I hit the target of 1,000 words the bar will turn green. If I go beyond 1,000 words the growth bar will turn red. After I pasted in the treatment paragraph to what I was calling Shenzhen (but it's changed now to Hong Chi) I edited the first sentence. The document was then 271 words of my 1,000 and this is what the bottom of the page looked like...
If I write 1,223 words it looks like this, meaning I'm over and must edit down, thus keeping me on target.
So, I have started to write, although I will stop often to research what I am writing about. My protagonist, in addition to being the glamorous Thai wife of the British consulate, is also a Wing Chun practitioner of some advanced skill. Wing Chun is the mysterious and hidden form of Kung Fu developed by Ypi Man (1893–1972) who passed it on to Bruce Lee's who made the form famous. So, one of my research steps will be to watch the "Ip Man" Blu Ray trilogy...for the third time.
Ah, here''s my first sentence... I'm sure it will change:
In the dead of night thirty-three thousand taxi sedans and motorcycles jammed the streets of Hong Chi shuttled men and women from the crowded luxury shops in Chao, to the colorful nightlife in Yezong and the go-go bars of Qu Plaza, where hundreds of young women exposed their assets just a block from Assumption Cathedral in one direction and the stiff upper lip British Consulate in the other.
A distant siren wailed.
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