Edmund Jorgensen over at Edmund’s technical ramblings has a really excellent post on leveraging Org mode in a nontrivial way for writing prose. Jorgensen is a software developer by day and a novelist by night. He’s published two novels and a book of short stories so he’s familiar with the problems that authors face.
His latest novel, World Enough (And Time), was in some trouble. He had several subplots going and when it came time for revision, he had a difficult time keeping track of the subplots and how a change in one might effect the others. Because he belongs to the school of writers who let their novels evolve—often in unexpected ways—his revision process frequently involves substantial changes as he gets new ideas from what he’s written so far.
Being an engineer as well as a writer, he naturally sought a technical solution to help him get control of the chaos. His first attempt was to track chapters and scenes in a spread sheet. That helped initially but became unwieldy. Jorgensen, however, was a serious Org mode user and he suddenly realized that Org held the answer to his problems.
I’ll let you read his post for the details. It’s worth reading even if you aren’t a novelist because his workflow could easily generalize to other situations. As usual, I learned something that I started using immediately: org-match-sparse-tree (or more generally, org-sparse-tree) allows you to filter for entries in an Org file containing a tag or combination of tags. It’s really useful, and as I say, I’ve already used it. I definitely recommend Jorgensen’s post.