Over at (:doom discourse), Mediapathic has a very nice post on using (Doom) Emacs for prose writing. He’s a writer currently working on a book so he can offer firsthand experience. The unifying theme of his post is using the Org outliner to structure and control your writing.
It isn’t so much about first writing an outline—although you can do that if that method works for you—but using the outliner functionality to write your prose in any order that you like and then easily move things around to achieve a coherent whole. Much of his post discusses ways to do that moving of things around and to generate an overview of your work.
Mediapathic makes use of tags to control the export of his text and also to help him track characters and story arcs. He might, for example, include tags for the characters in a scene and also a tag identifying the story arc.
He explains how he captures and keeps notes for his writing. Capturing a note can be especially tricky because you don’t want to lose the context of what you’re working on to capture a note. The Org mode capture functionality is perfect for this: you can pop up a capture template to record your note and get back to what you were doing.
Mediapathic also discusses some ancillary functions such as word counting, writing with a “blank page” buffer, and Palimpsest, a way of removing text but storing it for later retrieval.
If you’re a writer or interested in seeing how Emacs can be used for prose writing, be sure to take a look at Mediapathic’s post. He’s a Doom Emacs user but everything he describes is easily duplicated by vanilla Emacs users.