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Setting Goals and Using Script Insights to Help You Write

At Celtx, we’re always improving various parts of the Online Studio and one of our updates is Insights.  The updated feature it is sure to get you inspired, or at least motivate you to put fingers to keys.

Our new Insights feature allows you to set writing goals, track your progress and writing habits, and visually analyze the content of your story. 

Where to Find Goals and Insights
Script Goals
Script Insights
 - Understanding Script Insights


Where to Find Goals and Insights

Both of these features are available under the View menu in your top toolbar. Here you can access Script Goals and Script Insights as two separate features.

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Script Goals

You can open the Script Goals window either from the View menu, or by clicking the word count icon in the bottom left:

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In this new window you can set Today's Word Count.

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The bar that appears below Today's Word Count will fill in depending on how close you are to your goal. The closer you get the more the bar will be filled in.

If you're unsure what to set as Today's Word Count, you can use the Advanced section, which will tell you how many words you should aim for each day to complete your Total Word Goal, depending upon your goal Deadline.

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Script Insights

Clicking on Script Insights in the View menu will open the Script Statistics window.  

Your script statistics will tell you all sorts of information about the content of your script so far that will help you streamline your script and make decisions about characters.

For top level information, you can see the number of characters, settings, words and pages there are.

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To drill down further into the content of your script, you can view graphs that allow you to quickly analyze action vs. dialogue, or how many scenes each character appears in - and more.

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Clicking the hamburger thumbnail in the top right of each breakdown will allow you to see the raw numbers and percentages that make up the charts.

 

Understanding Script Insights

Each category in Script Insights using data from your script to help you understand the overall balance of your settings, characters and dialogue.

To understand what is being compared:

Action vs Dialogue measures the number of discrete incidents of each. So a paragraph of action counts as one, as does a paragraph of dialogue. 

In this short example from the movie "Big Fish" there are 3 incidents of action and 2 of dialogue.

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This helps you understand the overall balance of your script between action and dialogue.

Interior vs Exterior will show you the number of scenes that are tagged as Int. or Ext. or both (Int/Ext.)

Dialogue Distribution uses word count to measure each character's dialogue contribution.

By knowing which characters are speaking the most, you can keep an eye on the overall representation balance in your script. 

Setting Distribution tracks the number of times each setting, as an exact phrase, is used in a sceneheading. For instance, "Int. School Classroom - Day" and "Int. Classroom - Day" would count as two separate settings.

Characters by Scene uses the "character" format in your script to count how many scenes each character appears in. If the character is mentioned but does not have dialogue their appearance won't count for this metric.

 

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