V.E. Schwab's Writing Routine

Victoria Schwab writes some of the most atmospheric fantasy being published today, and she writes it in coffee shops, airport lounges, and hotel rooms. She has said in multiple interviews that she writes better when surrounded by ambient noise than when she's alone in a silent room. This is not the romantic image most people carry of how a novelist works, and that's exactly why it's worth paying attention to. The routine that produced the Shades of Magic trilogy, the Villains series, and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue was built around one honest piece of self-knowledge: she focuses by being out in the world, not by escaping from it.

Schwab is also one of the more openly prolific working novelists in genre fiction. She publishes regularly, often with multiple projects in different stages at once, and she's talked at length in interviews and on social media about treating writing as a job with hours and output expectations rather than as an art that shows up when it wants to. The routine is worth studying not because it's glamorous but because it scales. She's been doing it for years, across dozens of books, and the output speaks for itself.

Writing in Public

The common advice about writing is that you need quiet and isolation. Hemingway's bedroom in Cuba. Morrison's kitchen before dawn. A room of one's own. Schwab's practice is a useful challenge to that assumption because she's turned it inside out and built something just as productive. She's talked openly about needing the low hum of a coffee shop, the ambient chatter and clatter, to settle into the work. For her, the noise functions as pressure that keeps her from sitting too long inside her own second-guessing.

There's research that supports this, though she arrived at it through trial and error rather than neuroscience. A 2012 study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that moderate ambient noise, around 70 decibels, actually improves performance on creative tasks compared to both silence and loud environments. A coffee shop hits that range naturally. Schwab seems to have figured this out the same way most writers figure out what works: she tried different setups, noticed what the output looked like afterward, and kept doing the one that worked.

Writing in public also solves a problem that's common among dark fantasy writers who build elaborate internal worlds. The risk with immersive worldbuilding is that you spend the session inside the architecture and never get words on the page. The public setting creates a mild social pressure that keeps the session moving. It's harder to drift when you're at a coffee shop table than when you're alone in a study where you could wander to a bookshelf or lie down on the couch. The external environment keeps the internal environment honest.

Her comfort with writing anywhere also explains how she sustains output across a demanding travel schedule. Book tours, conventions, international travel for research and events: all of that could carve a writing career into fragments. Schwab made the mobility part of the method. She's written on planes, between signings, in hotel rooms before events. When your office is anywhere with a table and ambient noise, the calendar can't take it from you.

Music as a Drafting Tool

Every book Schwab writes gets its own playlist. This isn't a casual listening habit or a general writing soundtrack. She builds these playlists specifically for each project, curating tracks that match the book's tone, the emotional arc of certain scenes, or the feel of a particular character's headspace. The playlist becomes a way to drop back into the right gear between sessions without spending the first twenty minutes of each sitting trying to find where you left off.

This is smarter than it first sounds. The challenge of any long project is continuity. A novel takes months or years. You're working on it in fragments, between the rest of your life, and every time you come back you have to rebuild the mood that produced the last good pages. Most writers do this through rereading their previous session's work. Schwab adds a second layer: the music cues the emotional state before the words even start. The playlist is a re-entry tool, a way to get back into a world quickly rather than enjoy the music passively.

She's shared playlists for several books publicly, and the curation is specific enough to be instructive. The tracks she picks for a given book tend to match its tonal range, whether that's the harder, melancholy atmosphere of Vicious or something warmer and more bittersweet for Addie LaRue. When you read the books with the playlists in mind, you can hear the correspondence. The music is doing early craft work: it's setting the atmospheric conditions in which the sentences get written, and those conditions leave a trace in the prose.

For writers who struggle with the cold-start problem, this is one of the more practical techniques on record. A dedicated playlist for each project creates an audio anchor, a sensory signal that tells your brain this particular kind of attention is needed now. It's the same principle as Morrison's coffee and the changing light, or any other threshold ritual. Schwab's version happens to be portable and immediately scalable. You can build a playlist for your current project before your next session and try it tomorrow.

The Idea That Waited Thirteen Years

Schwab has talked in interviews about the origin of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue with a consistency that makes it one of the better-documented examples of a long-held idea finally finding its moment. She first had the concept around 2006 or 2007, the story of a woman who makes a deal with the devil to live forever but is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. For years, she couldn't figure out how to write it. The idea was clear but the structure wasn't there. She kept coming back to it and setting it down again.

The book finally came together and was published in 2020. Between conception and publication, she wrote and published more than a dozen other novels. The Addie idea was always running in the background, accumulating. When she finally had the structural key, the story of an immortal woman who finds one person who remembers her, the rest of the book came quickly. She's described the experience of drafting it as writing the book she'd been unable to write for over a decade suddenly being writable.

This is worth sitting with if you have ideas that have been following you around for years. Schwab's approach to the long-germinating idea was passive in a specific way. She didn't try to force it. She worked on other books, got better at the craft, lived more of her life, and returned to the concept periodically to see if she'd found the missing piece. When she finally had it, all the years of thinking paid off in a way they couldn't have if she'd forced the book earlier. Addie LaRue is arguably her best-reviewed and most widely read book, and it might not exist in that form if she'd published a version of it in 2009 before she knew how to write it.

This runs counter to the productivity model where faster is better and a good idea should become a book as quickly as possible. Some ideas aren't ready yet, and the writer isn't ready for them yet either. The right move is to keep going on the work that is ready and trust that the unfinished idea will wait. In Schwab's case, it waited thirteen years and then became the book that defined her career for a new generation of readers.