Jacob Moena has a long post on using Emacs for creative writing. He begins by explaining why anyone would want to do such a thing. Of course, Emacsers already know the answer: Emacs will make you more productive, especially if you are a touch typist.

The majority of his post is a “whirlwind tour” tour of Emacs. It’s a fairly detailed tutorial on the editor’s features that a creative writer is apt to find useful. He also covers some of the packages that he uses in his own writing, including, of course, Org mode. He notes that it’s most useful to think of Emacs as an editor construction kit—although he doesn’t use those terms—and that this is its great strength: you can make Emacs adapt to your way of working instead of having to adapt your way of working to your editor.

His most important takeaway, I think, is

“The secret about Emacs is that it is driven by muscle memory, just like a musical instrument. It takes some time to get there, but once you do, you can operate it instinctively.”

If you’re an experienced Emacs user, you’ll probably find the whirlwind tour boring since it covers material you’re already familiar with. Still, he does cover some specialized commands that you may not know about so it’s worth at least skimming over it. If you’re an Emacs n00b and interested in seeing if Emacs is a good fit for your writing, Moena’s post will help you get started and tell you what to expect. There are a few typos (usually involving command shortcuts) that may be confusing so if you see something that doesn’t appear to make sense, it’s probably just a typo.