Or what sometimes happens to me is I accidentally hit the control key and now I’m in some sort of weird mode.
Brian
You might want to give AbiWord a try. It’s free, straightforward, and does (I think) everything you need.
Anyone have a sense of how AbiWord, Libre OfficeWriter, and Scrivener differ from each other?
Scrivener is the odd one out there. It’s designed to help out with the process of writing, not so much page layout. So it has a bunch of features like an outliner and corkboard that you may find useless. It does have a low-distraction mode, but there are alternatives to that (like FocusWriter).
Libre OfficeWriter and Abiword are more traditional word processing programs. Abiword looks to be the simpler of the two.
When I’ve done that, usually hitting escape gets out of whatever weird mode. I agree with the suggestion to just keep using Microsoft Word and ignore all the extra stuff. Particularly if the OP doesn’t just want to use Notepad (or whatever the Apple equivalent is called).
I think your best bet is to go into your preferences and uncheck all the useless shit (which is 99 percent of it).
For page breaks, you don’t need a bunch of hard returns to force a chapter to the next page. You can just insert a page break from the drop down menu (under “Insert”)
If your file turned into read-only it means you password-protected it at some point.
It’s too late to edit my earlier post—I just remembered that you said you use a Mac. AbiWord doesn’t offer a current Mac version, so I probably shouldn’t have suggested it.
There is a old Mac version of AbiWord out there; it’s on the authors’ file server here, or you can find it on third-party download sites like MajorGeeks. I have no idea if it would run on your computer; this might be getting into “more trouble than it’s worth” territory.
Does it have that weird little strip of cardboard with all the function key macros on it?
That’s how you know it’s the real thing…
On the Windows version of Microsoft Word, ctrl-enter always worked for me to force a page break.
^^I made a keyboard shortcut for it instead of the default. The default is probably the same (or similar) on the Mac.
Same thing on MacOS
Yeah, that still works. I’ve used that forever.
To be honest I am intrigued by Scrivener. Sounds like it’s a step up from post -its pasted all over the wall.
Another program similar to scrivener is iaWriter, which is another word processor designed to provide what writers need with a minimalist interface:
It’s also available on most platforms.
If you are looking for something that will allow you to make complicated page formats, these programs aren’t it. But if you are looking for something that allows you to write without constantly getting into your way, these programs are great.
Of course it does. Pristine.
Are you suggesting this is not a genuine offer? 
I guess that offering a DOS 3.0 application to an Apple user probably crimps my chance of getting the sale … but I didn’t know that when the offer was made
Because there are many features that it forces upon me. I would like to ignore them, but Word won’t let me.
I will give three common examples, and then a simple solution for them.
One problem is that my keyboard has only one “quotes” button, and the picture on that button has two short lines going up and down. NOT slanted. Just plain quotes. Not “open quotes” or “close quotes”. And that’s what I want, but Word figures out how to turn the plain quotes into fancy quotes, but that’s not what I want.
Another problem is that if I begin a paragraph with “1)”, then Word decides that I am going to be making a numbered list, and it automatically indents the paragraph. But I don’t want it indented!
Or, if you type an ordinal number, like “2nd”, then Word changes the “nd” to a superscript, which can be difficult to read, in my opinion, especially in small fonts.
In all of these cases, and many more like them, if you press ctrl-z immediately after Word bullies you, it will undo the “improvement” and give you what you had wanted. The catch is that if you keep on typing, the undo will not be available any more, and you’ll have to fix it some other way.
But - as others have said - the truly best solution for this stuff is to go into Options and turn these features off.
Word’s fatal flaw, from day one, is that it contains the formatting for a paragraph in the (usually) invisible mark at the end of the paragraph. If you inadvertently delete that mark, the remaining text picks up the formatting from the next mark, and that is almost never what you intend. There are other non-printing marks like this (e.g. section break) and again, deleting them usually causes havoc.
Other work processing programs handle this in different ways, but none as badly as Word.
WordPerfect 3.x and FullWrite and Word 5.1 and WordNow and… for the Macintosh are all easily available online, no need to scrounge up a vintage edition, the problem is running them. Macintosh used to support “classic” applications, but now as far as I understand they do not. The situation is similar to running various programs on Windows which require at the very least the installation of something like DosBOX or winevdm. It’s not even that hard, but I am pretty sure the OP wants to spend more time writing and less computer hacking. I am not even sure Mac OS comes bundled with the requisite emulator subsystems any more.
Can I strongly suggest FreeOffice?
(No, it’s not the same as LibreOffice or OpenOffice.)
It’s excellent quality, professional, and unfussy. Available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
The word processor is called TextMaker.
The very first thing it asks you when you initially run it, is what kind of interface you want. Choose the Classic interface, and you will get this:
It has every feature you might possibly want, but it works straightforwardly and intuitively, and it’s not fiddly. The whole ‘feel’ of it is simple and solid.
You can save documents in docx format, PDF, and various other formats, and it will open all common document formats.
One thing it will not do is make an EPUB. You can do it using ConTeXt but that leaves behind the world of WYSIWYG editing (though it does have the advantage that you can “paginate, set margins and tabs, make headers… and set fonts and type sizes” once and for all in 10 lines of setup and then not worry about it any more, just paste in your text.