I just came across a tweet pointing to an old post by Urpo Lankinen about using Emacs for writing prose. I’m always interested in that topic so I followed the link and read the post. It seemed vaguely familiar—especially with its emphasis on the (then) new visual-line-mode functionality—so I searched Irreal and found that I’d written about it 5 years ago.
When I wrote about it the first time, I was mostly concerned with the importance that he gave to visual-line-mode. Reading it now, I am struck by how he leveraged Org mode to organize his writing. This was back in 2011 so Org was nowhere near as capable as it is now. He has a follow on post that he wrote after using Emacs/Org to write his 2011 NaNoWriMo entry. That post recounts his experience with using Emacs/Org on a long project.
It’s interesting to see how many of the things he complains about are fixed now. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to search his blog so I’m not sure if he’s posted further, more recent thoughts on writing with Emacs. If you use Emacs for writing straight prose, as opposed to code, you will probably enjoy his posts.