Phil Newton does a lot of writing. He’s written a book and has a blog and does all his writing in Org mode. That sounds pretty much like me but unlike me, Newton likes to write in what he calls a distraction free writing environment. I’m perfectly happy to write in a normal Org-mode buffer but I appreciate that others prefer a more uncluttered work area.
Newton prefers his text a little bigger, and likes it centered in the buffer. All that’s easy to do and Newton has a .dir-locals.el file in his writing directories to enforce his preferences. That’s nice because other buffer types—such as source code buffers—are unaffected and display as usual.
Almost everything he does, with the exception of Olivetti mode, is stock Emacs so you don’t need a lot of packages. He mentions that his inspiration for this environment is WriteRoom. Someone in the comments notes that Emacs has writeroom-mode that replicates most of the features in Newton’s environment and a few more.
If you’re one of those people who wants to see as close a possible to a blank page while writing, take a look at Newton’s post and checkout writeroom-mode. Newton’s setup, in particular, is so simple that it will be easy to adapt it to your ideal writing environment.