I'm jotting down some notes in Emacs in Fundamental Fill mode. I'm starting each one of my notes with a "-" on a new line. The problem is, whenever one of the notes I'm writing is too long to fit on a single line, it gets pushed down to the next line (which I want to happen) but Emacs goes ahead and automatically inserts another "-" for me out the front on the new line (which I don't want to happen). Is there a way to stop Emacs from exhibiting this "helpful" behaviour?
For note taking with emacs you could try emacs-org and M-x remember (both work with one another).
Another slightly offtopic answer would be to use word-wrap: you could let long line be longline in the file, but let emacs wrap line at word boundary for better readability with M-x toggle-word-wrap
Finaly, you can set adaptive-fill-mode to nil in your .emacs to remove this adaptive filling:
(setq adaptive-fill-mode ())
You could also look at adaptive-fill-regexp (see Emacs documentation for it)