Dostoevsky didn't leave a tidy manual on craft, but his letters are blunt about one thing above all: you rewrite, and then you rewrite again. He treated revision as the real work, and he named the masters who proved it.

The Direct Answer
Rewrite relentlessly. He believed good writing came from labor and revision, not a clean first draft.
His clearest statement is an 1845 letter to his brother Mikhail, written while he revised his first novel.

Revision Was the Whole Job

In the spring of 1845, a young and unknown Dostoevsky was finishing his first novel, Poor Folk, and driving himself half mad rewriting it. He wrote to his brother Mikhail that the book had kept him endlessly at work, that he had decided to do the whole thing over again, and that this latest pass was surely the last. Then he reached for reassurance from the giants.

I don't know whether Chateaubriand's 'Atala' was his first book, but I do know that he re-wrote it seventeen times. Pushkin did just the same with quite short poems. Gogol used to polish away at his wonderful works for two years at a time.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter to his brother Mikhail, 1845

This wasn't false modesty. Dostoevsky genuinely believed a first draft was raw material and that the writing happened in the rewriting. His whole career bore it out. Even his fastest work, the novel The Gambler dictated in about twenty-six days, went through a nightly cycle of transcription and morning correction before the fair copy was clean.

It helps to know he was twenty-three and frightened when he wrote that letter. Poor Folk was about to make him briefly famous, and he was still rewriting it out of something closer to fear than confidence. So the advice isn't the serene wisdom of an old master looking back. It's a young writer telling himself that the grinding, unglamorous rewriting is normal, that Chateaubriand and Pushkin and Gogol all did the same, and that he should keep going. That's the version most working writers actually need to hear.

Let the Pressure Do Some Work

The second lesson is harder to quote because it shows up in how he worked rather than in a single line. Dostoevsky wrote his best novels under crushing financial pressure, against deadlines that would have paralyzed most people, and he turned that into a method. The Stellovsky contract of 1866, which threatened to strip him of nine years of rights if he missed a date, is the reason The Gambler exists at all and got written in under a month. He had no illusions about the debt or the gambling that caused it, yet he understood that a real deadline forces a directness a comfortable writer rarely finds.

There's a third thread worth naming, because it runs through everything he wrote. Dostoevsky put his own life straight into the novels. He had been arrested, sentenced to death, and marched out to a firing squad in 1849 before a last-minute reprieve sent him to four years of Siberian prison. He knew epileptic seizures from the inside, and he knew exactly how it felt to lose the last of his money at a roulette table. He sanded none of it down. The intensity readers feel in the major books comes from a writer using his real material rather than keeping a safe distance from it, which is the one thing an imitator can never fake.

None of this is a call to suffer for art. Plenty of Dostoevsky's suffering produced nothing but suffering. It's a call to notice what conditions actually get you writing, then to build your working life around those instead of the ones you think you're supposed to want. For him the real conditions were odd hours, strong tea, a stack of planning notebooks, and a bill he couldn't dodge. See how the pieces fit together in the full Fyodor Dostoevsky writing routine.

What You Can Steal