Every draft I write starts life as a plain text file. Not a document, not a note in an app, just text: letters, spaces and line breaks, saved with a name and a date. I have files from fifteen years ago that open instantly on any machine I own, which is more than I can say for anything else I made in that time.

The folder is organised by nothing more than the date at the front of each file name:

2026-02-11 on margins.txt
2026-02-27 rain, again.txt
2026-03-04 writing in plain text.txt

Formatting comes last, if at all. A line on its own is a heading. A blank line is a new paragraph. Anything I want in italics gets a pair of asterisks, and I decide later whether I meant it.

The appeal is not really technical. It is that a plain file makes no promises about how the finished thing will look, and so it leaves me alone to think about what it will say.