Update
So I've been playing around a bit with LaTeX because I like the idea of what it can do. It sorts out all the tricky formatting depending on how you want to present your work. It's not ideal for collaborative editing though. Microsoft Word wins in that department with comments and tracking changes.
One of the ways I'm going to investigate using LaTeX is with some custom tags. This xkcd comic illustrates which characters interact with each other as a function of time over a story. Now that was produced by reading the books, and manually going through and making note of which characters are where and with who at each time. Ideally though, if that information is put into custom tags at various chapters or at points in the story it can be invisible to the reader, but a simple program or script could extract the information and produce a plot like that. Similarly, if we could generate one for characters, we can also do it for action, or emotional content.
Having the ability to produce graphs to demonstrate the action during a story or comedy say gives an author new tools with which to view the overall story. Is the front action heavy? Is it too dry? Is there enough story progression? Humans are visual creatures, so I'm hoping I can make something to produce these graphs, so that when I begin writing, I have a large number of tools available to guide my story.
Tags: improvement, phd, science, self, writing