There is a particular kind of lie writers tell themselves, and it is usually about how the book is going.
Feeling productive and being productive are not the same thing, and on a project that takes months, the gap between them can swallow whole seasons. The honest answer lives in numbers — words written, chapters finished, days showed up — and nobody wants to keep a spreadsheet about their novel.
So Charc keeps the numbers for you. Quietly, automatically, and without ever asking you to log anything. This post is about where they live and what they’re for.
The project dashboard
Open a project and this is the first thing you see, before any writing: four cards across the top — words written against your target, how much of the first draft is done, chapters completed, and which phase the book is in — with a progress bar for the draft underneath.
That’s the whole idea. Where the book stands, at a glance, every time you sit down. Not a report you generate; a wall you walk past on the way in.
Draft phases
A book moves through phases — prewrite, draft, revision — and the dashboard lets you make them visible. Each phase is a card you add, name, and give its own target, and each is colored — green, blue, red — so the shape of the project reads without counting anything.
When a phase finishes, it moves to the Chronicle below: a record of how the book was made, accumulating on its own. And that’s the right way to think about phases generally — they are a record, not a regimen. Add them as they happen, or don’t add them at all. Nothing in Charc waits on a phase card.
Word targets, from the book down to the scene
Your project gets an overall target when you create it — the number the dashboard measures against — and you can change it any time.
Below that, every act, chapter, and scene in the outline can carry a target of its own, so a chapter can say what it’s supposed to weigh. Chapters you haven’t set inherit a sensible default — the book’s target divided by the chapter count — which is why even a brand-new outline shows real numbers instead of zeros. As words land in scenes, the bars in the outline fill against those targets.
This is the quiet answer to a common drafting problem: the chapter that swells to three times the size of its neighbors without anyone noticing until revision. A target won’t stop you — but the bar will tell you.
The daily goal and streaks
The dashboard measures the book. The top bar of the Write tab measures today: the words you’ve written so far against a daily goal you set in Preferences. If a daily number feels too confrontational, set a weekly one instead — same bar, longer runway.
Write on consecutive days and you build a streak. And here Charc makes a small but deliberate choice: your best streak is kept as a permanent high-water mark. A bad week lowers the current streak. It never erases the best one you’ve had. The record of your discipline survives the interruptions to it, which is what makes the number motivating instead of punishing.
The part you don’t do
None of this is data entry. The counts come from the manuscript as you type. Finish a scene and the chapter bar moves; the dashboard updates; today’s words tick up; the streak extends itself at midnight. There is no “log session” button anywhere in Charc, and there never will be — writing is the only input the tracking needs.
Which means the numbers are trustworthy precisely because you never touch them. They are what happened, not what you remembered to record.
Glance at them. Don’t study them. Then go add to them — and when the draft is far enough along that you want it out of Charc and into the world, the next post covers exactly that. Every control mentioned here is documented in the Progress & goals reference.