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Every classic you love started like this. Crossed-out lines. Drawings in the margins. Handwriting only the writer could ...
04/30/2026

Every classic you love started like this. Crossed-out lines. Drawings in the margins. Handwriting only the writer could read. Novels are not born clean. Get your pages dirty.

George Orwell, 1984. Written 1946-1948 at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura. Dying of tuberculosis, Orwell typed in bed, coughing blood onto the pages. He flipped the last two digits of the year to get the title.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. Begun in 1865 at a hotel in Wiesbaden, where he was broke from roulette. He scrapped the entire first-person draft and started over, finishing in St. Petersburg while dictating The Gambler on a separate deadline.

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Written in a cork-lined bedroom at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, Paris. Bedridden with asthma, Proust worked by candlelight, at night, in bed—for fourteen years.

David Foster Wallace, The Pale King. Drafted in his garage office in Claremont, California, over more than a decade. He never finished. After his death in 2008, his wife Karen found the pages on his desk.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. Drafted in 1924 at Villa Marie on the French Riviera. Zelda was having an affair with a French aviator that summer. Scott used that pain and finished by October.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit. Begun on a blank exam page in his study at 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, 1930. He read it aloud to his children at bedtime. The illustrations—Helm’s Deep in colored pencil—were his own.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. Written in 1961 at Court Green, her thatched cottage in North Tawton, Devon. She outlined every chapter in red ink on pink Smith College memorandum paper.

Frank Herbert, Dune. Drafted across six years on a typewriter at home, notes piling up on yellow legal pads and the backs of receipts. He typed and retyped every word himself.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. Written in longhand in 100 consecutive days at his Los Gatos, California home, summer to autumn 1938. He filled a whole ledger book. His wife Carol typed every word.

Every great novel started on a desk somewhere… or a floor, or a bed, or a garden shed. Here’s where nine famous writers ...
04/14/2026

Every great novel started on a desk somewhere… or a floor, or a bed, or a garden shed. Here’s where nine famous writers actually wrote.

Roald Dahl wrote in his garden shed for 30 years. His mother’s old armchair, a sleeping bag over his legs, KitKat wrappers all over the floor. He told his that kids wolves lived inside there so they wouldn’t disturb him.

Hemingway never used his desk, which was religiously covered in books and discarded drafts. He wrote standing at a bookcase, typewriter at chest height, in oversized loafers on the skin of a kudu he’d killed.

Stephen King wrote Carrie in the laundry room of a trailer on his wife’s typewriter. After getting sober, he moved to a small desk in the corner. “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”

Frank Herbert typed Dune’s 215,000 words on long rolls of paper fed through his typewriter. No page breaks, just continuous typing for four to six hours at a stretch. “The thought comes into your head and goes right through your hands onto the paper.”

Joan Didion kept it spare. A small desk, a typewriter, a cup of coffee, and nothing else. Before editing a novel, she slept in the same room as the manuscript. The muscle memory of typewriter was everything to her. She often typed out whole Hemingway novels to feel his rhythm.

Jack Kerouac taped strips of paper into a 120-foot scroll and typed On the Road in 20 days. No paragraphs or page breaks. 100 words per minute. That scroll just sold for $12.1 million.

Susan Sontag wrote by hand on yellow legal pads in a Chelsea apartment buried under 15,000 books. Essays in the living room. Short stories in the bedroom.

James Baldwin wrote in bed. Propped on pillows, cigarette burning, legal pad on his knees. Cold-water flats in Harlem, a borrowed chalet in the Swiss Alps, a farmhouse in the south of France, but always the bed.

Tolkien started writing Middle-earth in a hospital bed, delirious with trench fever. Later, he wrote outdoors — in the garden, under the trees. When he couldn’t find the right words, he sketched the landscape instead.

What does your writing setup look like? And what would your dream setup be?

Every great novel starts as a scribble somewhere. Every sketch, stain, and crossed-out word tells a story. Here’s how ni...
03/30/2026

Every great novel starts as a scribble somewhere.

Every sketch, stain, and crossed-out word tells a story. Here’s how nine of the greatest writers in history put pen to paper.

J. R. R. Tolkien filled over 9,000 handwritten pages for The Lord of the Rings. When he couldn’t find the words to describe a landscape, he’d sketch it right there in the manuscript. One page is believed to be stained by his tears.

Jane Austen wrote with a quill pen her father gave her for her nineteenth birthday. Paper was expensive, so she cross-wrote her letters — filling the page in one direction, rotating it 90 degrees, and writing directly over her own words.

James Joyce collected ideas on napkins, envelopes, receipts, then transferred them into cloth notebooks. His eyesight was so bad that he used crayons to keep track of revisions.

Leo Tolstoy rewrote War and Peace eight times by hand. 1,200 pages. His wife Sophia was the only person on earth who could read it. She used a magnifying glass to decipher and copy out every draft.

Lewis Carroll not only wrote Alice’s Adventures Under Ground entirely by hand, he drew all 37 illustrations himself. Even his first drafts were literal works of art.

Jorge Luis Borges filled his notebooks with everything: poems, essays, and ink drawings. Even when he went completely blind at 55, Borges never stopped drawing (and wrote 40 more books).

Franz Kafka kept twelve quarto notebooks: part stories, part diaries. He burned about 90% of everything he wrote while still alive, then asked his best friend Max Brod to burn the rest. Brod refused.

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath in pencil on oversized ledger pages, keeping a work diary alongside the novel to log his word counts and anxieties. He used over 60 pencils on that manuscript alone. Blackwing 602s, sharpened every morning.

Fyodor Dostoevsky spent as much time drawing as writing. Over 200 manuscript pages are filled with portraits, buildings, and calligraphy practice. He wrote sideways, in the margins, across earlier text. He used crosses and circles to keep track of how his ideas connected, but even he still got lost.

How do you write?

On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden’s world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead i...
03/09/2026

On a February morning, Danielle Crittenden’s world cleaved in two: the life before her daughter Miranda was found dead in her Brooklyn apartment, and the life after. Dispatches from Grief is a revelatory, unflinching memoir that maps the strange afterlife of loss and the way grief reshapes everything it touches.

“Danielle Crittenden has written the book on losing a child-vivid, honest, and utterly without pretense. A companion for those who grieve, and a guide for those who want to help them.”
— Molly Jong-Fast |

“Many of us move through our lives thinking we know what to expect, until a plot twist changes everything... Dispatches from Grief is about how we find our way into this new story, not by ‘moving on,’ but by learning how to remain present when loss becomes permanent.”
— Lori Gottlieb |

“This is a book about the worst thing that you can imagine: the death of a child... Danielle Crittenden does this with grace and clarity, explaining how it is possible to go on living in an altered world.”
— Anne Applebaum |

“A little masterpiece. I was pulled through in one voracious sitting, moved by every line. Dispatches from Grief joins the literary canon of great books about mourning and the search for solace.”
— Tina Brown |

“Stunning, beautiful, and true on every page... The most moving and important book I’ve read in years.”
— Robert Kurson |

“The author’s pain is unvarnished Crittenden writes about her state of shock with scant yet emotive prose... A moving and intimate expression of pain.”
— Kirkus Reviews |

“Danielle Crittenden’s writing is spare without being stark, her story desperate without being humorless, her attitude open-hearted without being banal. She captures kaleidoscopically what was remarkable about her daughter Miranda, weaving in the exquisite and often joyous dynamics of her family.”
— Andrew Solomon |

Preorders are live now. Link in our bio!

Historic vibes in Manhattan last night for the launch of Jonathan Tepper’s breathtaking memoir Shooting UpAn incredible ...
02/18/2026

Historic vibes in Manhattan last night for the launch of Jonathan Tepper’s breathtaking memoir Shooting Up

An incredible night for an incredible author. Big congratulations, once again, to Jonathan Tepper. It’s an honor to publish such a book

Jonathan Tepper grew up handing out leaflets to he**in addicts in Madrid. He watched his dearest friends die of AIDS. He...
02/17/2026

Jonathan Tepper grew up handing out leaflets to he**in addicts in Madrid. He watched his dearest friends die of AIDS. He lost his little brother in a car accident at nine. He went on to become a Rhodes Scholar.

This is his story.

Shooting Up is out now. You can find the link in our bio.

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