If you’ve been around Irreal for a while you know that I love reading about how people are using Emacs for non-engineering/scientific purposes such as creative writing. It’s hardly a surprise that creative writers, for example, find Emacs a superb tool for their writing. After all, its raison d’être is the efficient entry and editing of text. Of course, Emacs’ superiority doesn’t stop there. Its configurability means that each writer can adjust it to exactly match their individual workflow.
Christopher Fin has an great post on tips for writing novels with Emacs. The post lists some of the packages he uses and why he finds them useful. One interesting feature of his workflow is that he has slightly different modes for “writing” and “editing”. The writing mode is the creative part where he puts his story into words. In this mode he turns off error-checking packages (like git-gutter-mode) and turns on things like Olivetti mode. In editing mode he turns on things like flyspell-buffer and langtool-check-buffer that help with editing his manuscript.
Another useful feature that Fin added was some custom word counting functions. He writes in Org mode so there’s a certain amount of boilerplate in the buffer. He solves that by exporting the buffer to text and running his word counter on that. That’s a nice trick worth stealing if accurate word counting is important to you.
Fin’s post is specifically intended as a selection of things he’s found useful for book writing with Emacs not as a comprehensive guide. For a more complete guide, he points to Jacob Moena’s post on Creative writing with Emacs. Moena gives much more detail on how he uses Emacs and packages for his writing. It’s a long post but worth reading if you’re interested in using Emacs for creative writing.
These are two very worthwhile posts and deserve your attention if you use Emacs for writing.