Git Isn’t Just for Developers. It Might Be the Best Writing Tool Ever

A novelist and writer argues that Git and plain text are the ideal tools for managing creative writing, not just code. Drawing from a near-disaster when a colleague lost her manuscript on a USB drive, the author describes a six-year journey migrating all writing to plain text files in a Git mono-repo. Git's commit history becomes a 'time machine' documenting the evolution of creative work, while plain text ensures longevity and portability across decades. The piece frames this as a political stance against platform lock-in, AI scraping, and the fragility of proprietary cloud tools, advocating for self-hosted, version-controlled, openly licensed writing studios designed to outlive their creators.