Dostoevsky built his novels in two stages. First came months of notes and arguments with himself in his planning notebooks. Then came fast, intense drafting, sometimes dictated aloud, that he revised heavily afterward.

The Direct Answer
He planned obsessively in notebooks, then drafted fast, sometimes by dictation, and revised hard.
The clearest record of his method is Anna Dostoevskaya's Reminiscences and his surviving planning notebooks.

The Notebooks Came First

Before Dostoevsky wrote a scene, he thought on paper. His planning notebooks, several of which survive, weren't tidy outlines. They were a separate layer of the work where he tried out plots, argued both sides of an idea, sketched characters, then crossed it all out and started again. Edward Wasiolek's edition of The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment shows how much invention happened before the novel proper began. By the time he drafted, the intellectual heavy lifting was largely done, which is part of why the finished books carry so much thought without reading like lectures.

That front-loading mattered because his life kept interrupting the work. A seizure could take him out for days, deadlines kept shifting, and he often had two books going at once. The notebooks were the fixed map he could return to whenever the terrain of a novel had gone dark in his memory. He could pick the thread back up because he had already argued the book into existence on paper before he started drafting it.

How He Drafted: Dictation and Revision

The most revealing episode is the writing of The Gambler. In 1866 Dostoevsky owed a novel to the publisher Stellovsky under a contract that would have handed Stellovsky nine years of rights to his work, unpaid, if he missed the November 1st deadline. He was already deep in Crime and Punishment and had no time to spare. So he hired one of Russia's first stenographers, the nineteen-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. She came to his apartment around noon, he dictated while pacing the room, she took it down in shorthand, transcribed it at home in the evening, and brought him fair copy to correct the next morning. The novel was finished in about twenty-six days.

The early sessions were rough. Anna later remembered how unsettled he was before the method found its rhythm.

He obviously was irritated and could not collect his thoughts. Now he would ask me my name and immediately forget it, then commence walking around the room, would walk for a long time, as if having forgotten my presence.

Anna Dostoevskaya, Reminiscences

What makes the speed remarkable is that he was writing The Gambler and Crime and Punishment in the same stretch of 1866, two books that could hardly be more different in scale. The clock didn't lower his standards. Anna watched him stop, think, ask her to read a line back, and change it. The pressure forced a leanness his longer novels don't have, which is why The Gambler still reads like his tightest book.

Dictation suited him more than it might suit most writers. He liked to hear his prose. Anna records that he would sometimes wake her in the night to read her a passage he had just finished. He needed an ear in the room to know whether a scene was landing, and that reliance on the spoken sentence carried straight into the finished novels, where the voices of narrators and characters do so much of the work. He delivered The Gambler on time and married Anna a few months later, in February 1867.

None of it came out smooth on the first pass. Dostoevsky worked in bursts, usually against a deadline, then revised hard. He described his first novel as a thing he simply could not break loose from, rewriting it again and again. The major books move the way they were made, circling back on a scene from new angles, re-entering a character's mind several times over. For the full context, the tea and epilepsy and night hours included, see the full Fyodor Dostoevsky writing routine.

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