As many of you know, I’m fascinated by those who use Emacs for projects that don’t involve science or engineering. One such aspect that I always enjoy reading about is using Emacs for creative writing, by which I mean novels, short stories, poetry, and the like.
That may seem like an edge case but there are plenty of writers who write their novels with Emacs, including such A-list writers as Vernor Vinge and Neal Stephenson. There’s little reason to wonder why. Emacs has superb editing and linking capabilities that makes writing and organizing a piece of prose easier than it would be with most other writing platforms.
John Urquhart Ferguson is another writer who uses Emacs and he’s written a package, Org Novelist, to make the note taking and story organization easier. A full-blown novel can have several minor characters and locales that are hard for the author to keep track of. Similarly, ideas may occur to the author that don’t involve whatever part of the story is currently being worked on and a way of capturing those notes is needed. Ferguson’s package is intended to help with that. Best of all, the package let’s you write your prose in Org mode.
Ferguson has a short announcement on reddit but to really get a feeling for what the package is about and what it can do, take a look at the README on his GitHub repository. The package is not on MELPA or any of the other package repositories so you’ll have to download it from GitHub.
Ferguson stresses that the package was written for his own use with his particular workflow but he’s releasing it in case others find it useful. From the README, that seems likely to me so if you’re interested in a package to help you with your creative writing, take a look.