V.E. Schwab has a reputation as a coffee shop writer, and for a long stretch of her career that was accurate. The fuller picture, pieced together from her own accounts over more than a decade, has moved along with her.
How the Coffee Shop Habit Started
Schwab has traced the habit back to her senior year of college, when she made a deliberate decision to stop treating writing as something she'd get to eventually. She started checking out of her art studio space for two hours a night and walking across the street to a coffee shop instead.
I began checking out of my art studio space for two hours every night from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m., walking off-campus to a coffee shop across the street, and sitting down and writing for two hours a night.
V.E. Schwab, The Worldshapers podcast, March 2019
Output varied. Some nights she'd get 500 words, other nights closer to 2,000. What mattered was that she showed up at the same table on the same schedule. That run of nightly sessions produced the draft of The Near Witch, her debut novel, published in 2011.
Airports, Hotel Bars, and Now Mostly Home
Once she was publishing regularly, touring reshaped where the work happened. In that same 2019 interview, she described writing wherever the schedule put her: in airports, in hotel bars, in hotel rooms between events. A career built on constant travel meant the coffee shop model had to stretch to fit planes and lobbies too.
That's shifted again more recently. In an October 2025 interview with The Gloss Magazine, Schwab said she now does the vast majority of her writing from a flat she bought in Portobello, a seaside neighborhood of Edinburgh, with a view of Arthur's Seat. When she does leave the flat to write, it's usually to a cafe near Portobello Books, her local bookshop. She currently splits her time between Edinburgh and Denver, Colorado.
See the full V.E. Schwab writing routine for how this fits with her schedule and her process overall.
What You Can Steal
- Attach the habit to a place, not a mood. Schwab's college routine worked because the coffee shop was fixed. The mood around writing didn't have to be right.
- Let a public space supply pressure you don't have to generate yourself. If focus is the problem, borrow the environment's built-in structure.
- Expect the ritual to change. Hers moved from a campus cafe to airports to a home office by the sea. The constant wasn't the location. It was showing up.
- Keep a backup spot in reserve. Even now, mostly working from home, she still has a specific cafe for the days home doesn't work.