Chris Maiorana has an interesting post that asks if Org mode is better for writers. He starts with the beginning of Ambrose Bierce’s story A Watcher By The Dead displayed in Libre Office and notes that LibreOffice will do everything you need to write a story, format it, and send it off to a publisher. Why, then, he asks, would you bother with learning Emacs and Org mode?
To me, not having to write in Word or one of its spawn-of-the-devil siblings is reason enough but Maiorana has a less emotional response. He starts by by observing that you can just write your prose and not worry about what the output will look like until later. For example, you might use the markup for underlining but at export time you can arrange for it to be rendered differently.
The rest of the video considers structural editing. That’s an idea that’s important to writers but may not be familiar to the rest of us. The idea is that you can mark up your manuscript in a way that reflects the structure of the story. This is important for understanding the flow of your story and how it hangs together. Naturally you don’t want this markup to appear in the final output and Org makes it easy to arrange for this.
In the end, Maiorana concludes that Org is definitely worth learning. Watch his video for all his reasons why he thinks this. The video is 16 minutes, 50 seconds long so you’ll probably need to schedule some time.