Schwab talks about process more openly than most working novelists, across her blog, interviews, and a NaNoWriMo pep talk written for writers stuck mid-draft. A few pieces of advice come up again and again.
Find an Ending You Can't Wait to Reach
Asked directly about her process, Schwab has said she works backward from the finish, settling on the ending before she drafts toward it. Her reasoning is practical, not mystical. It's about giving yourself a measurable distance to travel.
Find an ending that excites you, and write toward it. The main reason writers abandon projects is because they don't know where they're going, or the distance isn't measurable. But if you have an ending that excites you, then on good days, you can't wait to write, and on bad days, you won't quit because you know there's an end.
V.E. Schwab, interview with Dead Darlings, October 2022
She's described her outlining process in similar terms elsewhere, calling herself 'a connect-the-dots-er.' Before drafting, she settles on five to ten plot points that have to happen for the story to be the story she wants to tell. She leaves the space between those points open, so the drafting itself still has room for discovery. The dots exist to stop her from abandoning the book halfway through. The lines between them are where the actual writing happens.
Finish Before You Fix
In a pep talk she wrote for NaNoWriMo, Schwab pushed back on the instinct to make a first draft good. A first draft, she's argued, only has one job: to exist. She's compared it to building the bones of a body rather than the finished thing, no muscle or skin required yet, just the frame that later drafts can build on.
That idea runs through an earlier blog post too, one she titled simply Just Keep Writing. Her advice there is blunt: if a book doesn't sell and you want to keep going, you write another one. The market and the reception aren't within a writer's control. The manuscript is. She's called the daily act of writing her 'tether in the storm,' the one part of the job that holds steady whether things are going well or falling apart.
Read the full V.E. Schwab writing routine for how this advice fits into her actual daily schedule.
What You Can Steal
- Find your ending before you draft toward it. An exciting, specific finish line gives you a distance you can actually measure.
- Pick five to ten non-negotiable story beats, then let yourself improvise the rest. Structure and discovery aren't opposites.
- Let the first draft be bad. Its only job is to exist so a later draft can fix it.
- On hard days, go back to the one thing you control. Not the sales, not the reviews. The words on the page today.