editing - emacs for creative writing

Does anyone know a good emacs configuration for creative writing? I'd be looking for the ability to write, edit, and export to libre office or word (so the less technical people get edit/view). I'm looking for something that would be appropriate for novels, not just short stories or blogging.

Answer

My personal setup uses Vim, but a large part of the stack would be applicable to any sufficiently advanced text editor. (Note: "sufficiently advanced text editors" are basically just emacs and Vim.) I don't know of any existing package that does all of this, but writing this for myself was actually pretty easy since it's just a matter of stitching together the existing tools.

Composing

I compose all of my stories using Markdown markup (the same markup that StackExchange uses on all of its sites). This allows me to do basic formatting (italics, underlining, outlining) with simple text decorations. For ordinary writing purposes, more complicated formatting is almost never necessary and is almost always a distraction. There already exist packages for both Vim and Emacs to facilitate syntax highlighting and other shortcuts for composing text in Markdown.

I write with Vim's spell-checker turned on. My .vimrc (.emacsrc for you) automatically looks for a file called .custom.add in the same folder as the file, and includes it as a custom dictionary. This allows me to add character names, place names, invented words, etc. to the custom dictionary for every story. When I'm done, the .custom.add file then serves as a convenient list of characters and other non-English words that appear in the story.

I have mapped a keystroke to invoke dict, allowing me to look words up in a dictionary with a single button, either to search for synonyms or check on my spelling. I've mapped other keystrokes to exporting to any of the formats discussed below.

Exporting

I use pandoc for converting from Markdown into any of the myriad formats that pandoc supports. In my case, I'm interested in LaTeX (which I later convert into PDF), HTML, and RTF. Getting good LaTeX and RTF output requires that you write a custom output template, but this is actually pretty trivial, and the pandoc documentation covers this in plenty of detail.

I use the sffms LaTeX package for typesetting the LaTeX/PDF output. Sffms makes it dead-simple to create manuscripts that fit standard manuscript format with no effort at all. I prefer to send PDFs to people unless they've specified otherwise.

RTF can be read natively by every existing word-processing program, so I rarely find the need to convert it to something else. If I do, I open up the RTF file in Word and then save it in Word format, which is usually the only other thing that people ask for.