I’ve written before about Peter Prevos and his Emacs Writing Studio but here’s a bit more. I’ve had this article about the Emacs writing workflow up in my browser for a long while and decided the time had come to either write about it or delete the tab.
Prevos views writing as a five step process:
- Ingestion
- Reading, listening to, or watching content as a source of ideas. Emacs, of course, has extensive support for this.
- Ideation
- This stage involves taking notes about the content from the ingestion step. Emacs has exceptionally strong support for this with the Org package as well as other packages, such as Denote and Org Roam, to help you organize your notes. Prevos uses five types of notes that you can read about in his article.
- Production
- This is the step where you write your post, article, book, or whatever. It is, I think, the most enjoyable part of the process. Again, Emacs has our backs for this step. Unless you have special requirements, you almost certainly want to write your text in Org mode. The Org markup makes it easy to apply almost any formatting you’re apt to need for a writing project and the export system lets you deliver the final product in almost any format.
- Publication
- This is where you produce the final product. It could be a simple post, a longer magazine or journal article, or a even book. If you wrote in Org mode, you can produce a product suitable for any or all of these with the push of a button.
- Communication
- In this step, you tell the world about your product. Emacs has support for email, IRC, social media and other ways of communicating from inside the editor.
If you produce written output, you’ll probably recognize most of these steps even if you don’t follow Prevos’ workflow exactly. I use something vaguely resembling the first four steps but don’t do anything about communicating my daily Irreal output.
Prevos notes that his workflow is his workflow and others most likely do something different. Still, there’s some good ideas in his article that any writer can adapt for their own use.