How 12 Famous Writers Organize Their Notes

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Pale Fire on 1,092 numbered index cards ¹. Joan Didion called her notebooks a way to "keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be" ². Anne Lamott carried a folded index card in her back pocket ³. The tools differ wildly across a century of literature. The discipline does not.

This essay catalogs the working systems of twelve writers whose methods are documented in primary sources — interviews, memoirs, published journals, archived manuscripts. Three patterns recur: index-carders who composed in fragments, journal-keepers who wrote daily for decades, and tool-builders who reshaped software to fit the way their minds work. Mason Currey's Daily Rituals compiled 161 such profiles in 2013 and made the genre permanent; this essay narrows the lens to twelve ⁴. The "Daily Routine of 20 Famous Writers" essay remains one of the most-shared writing pieces ever published ⁴. Below, the rule for every entry is the same: a verified quote, a documented method, one habit a reader can steal.

Joan Didion's grocery-list notebooks

Joan Didion's notebook was not a record of fact. It was a record of feeling. She wrote in her 1968 essay "On Keeping a Notebook": "How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook" ². Notes existed to maintain contact with the self that lived through them — a witness, not a transcript.

The notebooks were small and scrappy. Didion famously cited a single line from one of hers — "That woman Estelle is partly the reason why George Sharp and I are separated today" — and admitted she had no idea who Estelle was. The line stayed because the feeling stayed ². Her instruction was severe: "I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not" ². The notebook was a continuity machine.

Didion's "Why I Write," delivered as a 1975 Berkeley lecture, sharpens the same idea into method: "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means" ⁵. The notebook produces the pictures; the essay decodes them.

Steal this: Stop trying to make your notes accurate. Make them faithful to how the moment felt. The accurate version is in the receipts; the felt version is in you.

Vladimir Nabokov's 1,092 index cards

Vladimir Nabokov composed novels out of order. He told Playboy in January 1964 — in the Alvin Toffler interview later reprinted, with the author's revisions, in Strong Opinions (1973) — "I do not begin my novel at the beginning... I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards" ⁶. Sequence came last.

Pale Fire survives as 1,092 numbered cards in the manuscript archive ¹. Lolita was drafted on "lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers" ⁷; cards from that manuscript live at the Library of Congress in the Nabokov Papers (LOC MSS-86440). His final, unfinished novel The Original of Laura was published as a 138-card facsimile in 2009, smudges and crossings-out intact ⁷. Three cards, he calculated, equaled one typewritten page ⁶.

The cards traveled. Véra Nabokov drove him on butterfly expeditions and he composed in the back seat with the deck on his knees ⁷. "Every card is rewritten many times," he told Playboy; only when the deck felt complete did he dictate it to her for typing in triplicate ⁶.

Steal this: Write the scenes that are ready, not the scenes that come next. A novel is a sortable deck. A first draft does not need a first chapter on the first day.

Ernest Hemingway's blue-backed notebooks

Ernest Hemingway worked in pencil, in cafés, in the early morning. His ritual is named in A Moveable Feast (1964): "The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful), the marble-topped tables, the smell of cafe cremes... were all you needed" ⁸. The list was a packing list for a working life.

His blocked-day instruction, also from A Moveable Feast, is the most-quoted sentence about writing in twentieth-century English: "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know" ⁸. The second instruction is operational: "Always stop when you know what is going to happen next." Stopping at the known crest meant the next morning's start was downhill.

Hemingway preferred pencil because the medium itself was a revision pass — "you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want" — read, typed, proofed ⁹. In November 1956 he recovered two steamer trunks of 1920s notebooks from the basement of the Hôtel Ritz; those notebooks became the seed of A Moveable Feast ⁸.

Steal this: Stop mid-sentence, not at the end of a section. Tomorrow's draft starts already moving.

Susan Sontag's hundred notebooks

Susan Sontag kept journals from age fourteen until her death in 2004 — roughly one hundred notebooks, now archived at UCLA's Charles E. Young Research Library ¹⁰. The published volumes, edited by her son David Rieff, run to roughly 2,000 pages: Reborn (2008) for the years 1947–1963, and As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh (2012) for 1964–1980 ¹¹.

Sontag rejected the diary-as-confession framing. From Reborn: "Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts — like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood" ¹². The notebook was an instrument of construction, not record.

The discipline was non-negotiable. On 19 July 1979 she instructed herself in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: "I must write every day. Anything. Everything. Carry a notebook with me at all times, etc." ¹³. The "etc." is what made the rule a life.

Steal this: A journal is not where you store the self. It is where you make one.

John McPhee's coded index cards

John McPhee — New Yorker staff writer since 1965, Pulitzer winner in 1999 ¹⁴ — built his architecture out of three-by-five cards and a customized DOS text editor. He laid out the method in "Structure," published in The New Yorker on 14 January 2013 and collected in Draft No. 4 (FSG, 2017) ¹⁵.

The mechanism is this: McPhee types interview transcripts and field notes, prints them, and cuts the pages into hundreds of slivers. Each sliver gets a code — a short letter sequence representing a theme or scene. The slivers go on a corkboard until the structure resolves. Then a Princeton IT staffer named Howard Strauss wrote him two custom KEDIT macros, called Structur and Alpha. "Structur exploded my notes," McPhee writes. "It read the codes by which each note was given a destination or destinations (including the dustbin)" ¹⁶. Alpha then "implodes the notes it works on. It doesn't create anything new. It reads codes and then churns a file internally" ¹⁶.

The dustbin matters. Half the work, by McPhee's own admission, is deciding what does not go in.

Steal this: Tag every note with a destination keyword the day you write it. The tags are how the next draft finds itself.

Tom Wolfe's tight outline

Tom Wolfe was a planner. His Paris Review interview "The Art of Fiction No. 123" (Spring 1991) records the daily quota: "ten pages a day, triple-spaced, which means about eighteen hundred words. If I can finish that in three hours, then I'm through for the day" ¹⁷. Inspiration was not a factor in the schedule.

The outline came first. "I made a very tight outline of everything I wrote before I wrote it" — the outline, Wolfe said, was itself a kind of writing, because it set the structure of what would follow ¹⁷. His draft manuscripts for The Bonfire of the Vanities — research notes, character sketches, and outline — are archived at the New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division ¹⁸.

The factory metaphor was Wolfe's own. "Just like working in a factory — end of ten pages, I'd close my lunch pail." Some days the ten pages advanced him an eighth of an inch down the outline. It did not bother him; the outline carried the structure even when the prose felt slow ¹⁷.

Steal this: Set a daily floor — pages or words — and treat it like factory output, not art. The outline is the conveyor belt. Showing up is the job.

Anne Lamott's pocket index card

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird (Pantheon, 1994) contains a short chapter titled "Index Cards" that has become a writer-handbook standard ¹⁹. The instruction is portable in every sense: fold an index card lengthwise, slide it into a back pocket with a pen, and head out — ready to catch any phrase worth keeping ²⁰.

The verbatim passage: "So whenever I am leaving the house without my purse — in which there are actual note pads, let alone index cards — I fold an index card lengthwise in half, stick it in my back pocket with a pen, and head out, knowing that if I have an idea, or see something lovely or strange or for any reason worth remembering, I will be able to jot down a couple of words to remind me of it" ²⁰.

The cards are also souvenirs. Lamott describes folding two cards into puppets to entertain her son during an emergency-room visit for his first asthma attack — one card had a shopping list, the other became, eventually, a written record of that night ¹⁹. The note and the keepsake are the same object.

The card's job is not to be a polished thought. It is to catch the phrase before the phrase is gone. Most cards are discarded. The ones that survive do the work of every later draft.

Steal this: Carry a folded index card and a pen, always, even on the walk to the mailbox. The card does not require a notebook around it.

Neil Gaiman's Leuchtturm and fountain pen

Neil Gaiman writes first drafts by hand, in fountain pen, in numbered notebooks. He told Tim Ferriss in a March 2019 interview: "My usual notebook right now is a Leuchtturm, because I really like the way you can paginate stuff in them and the thickness of the paper" — what he called "the Porsche of Moleskines" ²¹.

The Moleskine, once a favorite, he abandoned: paper quality dropped, and fountain-pen ink began to bleed through ²¹. The two-pen ritual is the productivity trick. Gaiman uses at least two fountain pens with different-colored inks during a project so he can see at a glance what was written that day ²¹. Visible daily output is the only proof a long book is moving.

The novels written by hand are not a stunt. Stardust was written longhand because Gaiman was setting it mentally in the 1920s and wanted his head to operate at that pace; American Gods, Anansi Boys, The Graveyard Book, and parts of The Sandman: Dream Hunters followed the same method ²¹. "I started with Stardust," he told Ferriss. "I bought a fountain pen and a big notebook and wrote it by hand to find out how writing by hand changed my head" ²¹.

Steal this: Switch ink colors on a long project. Visible daily progress on the page beats any word-count tracker.

George R.R. Martin's DOS machine

George R.R. Martin writes A Song of Ice and Fire on a DOS computer running WordStar 4.0, a word processor released in 1987. On Conan in May 2014 he described the rig: "I have my writing computer, which is a DOS machine, not connected to the Internet" — a separate machine, walled off from email and browser ²².

His reasoning is autocorrect-shaped: "I actually like it. It does everything I want a word processing program to do, and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. If I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed a capital. I know how to work a shift key" ²². The point is not nostalgia. The point is that with forty-five named houses and a thousand named characters, every "helpful" autocorrect is an enemy.

WordStar 4.0 was already a relic in 1987, and twice a relic in 2014. Martin has used it for the entirety of A Song of Ice and Fire, the first book of which (A Game of Thrones) was published in 1996. The cost of switching is now infinite ²².

Steal this: Disconnect the writing computer. Or at least disconnect the writing application. Reachability is a tax on attention.

Maya Angelou's stripped hotel room

Maya Angelou could not write at home. Her solution, documented in the Paris Review "Art of Fiction No. 119" (Fall 1990), was to rent a small hotel room in whatever city she lived in and turn it into a working cell ²³. She would arrive at 6:30 a.m. and write by hand on yellow legal pads, lying across the bed.

The room was deliberately bare. Angelou had the hotel staff remove every picture from the walls and never permit the bed to be changed — she did not sleep there ²³. The materials were the same in every room: yellow pads, a Bible, Roget's Thesaurus, a deck of cards for solitaire when stuck, a bottle of sherry, an ashtray ²³. She wrote in longhand until midday, then went home, looked at the morning's work around five, and started the next day fresh.

The room's job was the absence of cues. "I want everything taken off the walls," she told the Paris Review. The cell stripped the day of associations until the only thing left to do was write the next sentence ²³. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several volumes of poetry under this protocol ²⁴.

Steal this: Build a writing cell with no biographical cues. The same chair, the same notebook, the same lamp, in the same posture. The brain follows the cell.

Patricia Highsmith's 56 notebooks

Patricia Highsmith kept two parallel notebooks her entire adult life, from Barnard in 1941 until shortly before her death in 1995. One — the diary — recorded what she did and who she saw. The other — the cahier — recorded story ideas, technical problems, and the craft of the novel ²⁵. Both ran simultaneously, in identical spiral-bound volumes.

In 1995, her editor Anna von Planta found 56 spiral notebooks behind Highsmith's bed linens at her Swiss home — roughly 8,000 pages ²⁶. Von Planta spent twenty-six years editing the collection down to a single 995-page volume, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks 1941–1995, published by Liveright and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2021 on the centenary of Highsmith's birth ^{25 26}. The published book interleaves diary and cahier so a reader can see the day-life and the craft-life on the same page ²⁵.

Highsmith refused to authorize a biography. The notebooks were the autobiography she would not write.

Steal this: Run two notebooks in parallel — one for the life, one for the work. The link between them is the story you have not yet noticed you are inside.

Cory Doctorow's memex blog

Cory Doctorow has blogged daily since 13 January 2001, first at Boing Boing (53,906 posts across nineteen years), and from February 2020 onward at his solo blog Pluralistic.net ²⁷. He calls the system "The Memex Method," after Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think." The blog is the notebook; the notebook is public.

The mechanism, from his 2021 essay "The Memex Method": "My private notebooks are unreadable, disorganized messes... The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not" ²⁸. Audience is the editor. WordPress full-text search and tags do the retrieval ²⁸.

The output justifies the method. Doctorow has published more than two dozen novels, several short-story collections, and book-length nonfiction on copyright, monopoly, and DRM since 2003 ²⁹. His 2023 essay collection The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso) was assembled almost entirely from Pluralistic posts on antitrust and interoperability — the blog as a book-shaped silt deposit ²⁹. He attributes the volume directly to the blog: "Blogging isn't just a way to organize your research — it's a way to do research for a book or essay or story or speech you don't even know you want to write yet" ²⁸. Fragments accumulate; some nucleate; the nucleated ones become essays.

Steal this: Publish your notes, even badly, even partially. The discipline of an audience — even an imaginary one — does what private notebooks cannot.

The pattern across all twelve

The tools share nothing. Nabokov used Bristol cards; Martin uses DOS; Angelou used yellow legal pads in a bare hotel; Doctorow uses WordPress in public. Sontag wrote daily; Wolfe outlined first; Lamott jotted on a card folded in her pocket. No two systems are alike. The pattern is not in the medium.

The pattern is the rule each writer imposed on themselves. The twelve systems sort into five disciplines:

1. Show up daily — Sontag, Hemingway, Wolfe.
2. Make the unit of thought small enough to rearrange — Nabokov, McPhee, Lamott.
3. Keep the tool simple enough not to fight you — Martin, Angelou, Gaiman.
4. Make the act of writing the act of thinking — Didion, Doctorow.
5. Run two notebooks at once, so the day's events and the day's ideas have separate residences — Sontag's life-and-thought, Highsmith's diary-and-cahier. The diary stores what happened. The cahier stores what mattered.

Discipline is the constant. Tools are the variable.

NaNoWriMo — the 25-year-old writing community that organized hundreds of thousands of writers each November (peaking near 400,000) — shut down in April 2025 after financial collapse, compounded by an AI-policy and content-moderation controversy ^{30 31}. The writers who passed through its forums are now looking for new tools. The twelve systems above are not new. They are what works when the platform that promised to organize you is gone.

How to start your own commonplace book in MNMNOTE

A commonplace book is a writer's gathering basin — quotes, fragments, half-thoughts, dated entries — that compounds over years. MNMNOTE is a browser-based markdown editor built for exactly this use: open a tab, type, the file is saved in the browser on your own device and never leaves the device. No account. No vendor death clock.

The pattern fits all twelve methods above. Each note is a card (Nabokov, McPhee, Lamott). Wiki-links connect cards into the deck (Didion's people-she-used-to-be; Highsmith's diary-and-cahier crossings). Markdown is plain text — exportable, future-proof, reader-readable in 2050 (Hemingway's notebooks survived sixty years in a hotel basement; markdown files will outlive any app) ³². The full case for why this matters — why your notes should outlive your app — is documented elsewhere on this blog.

A starting protocol: one note per day, dated, with a single quote, a single observation, and a single question. Run it for thirty days. The notebook will tell you who you are becoming, the way Didion's told her — and the way Sontag's, over decades, told the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

These seven questions surface most often in reader threads on r/writing, the Paris Review comment sections, and the Famous Writing Routines newsletter. Each answer below pulls from the primary sources cited above — the Paris Review interviews, the published journals, the writers' own books — and avoids the secondary listicles that have garbled these methods for two decades ⁴.

Q: Which writer's note system is most copyable for non-professional writers?

Anne Lamott's. The folded index card in the back pocket costs nothing, requires no setup, survives airport security, and works while walking. The pocket-card-and-pen has been the entry-level writing system since the Roman wax tablet ²⁰. Most working writers carry some version of it even when they also keep elaborate digital systems.

Q: Did any of these writers use a "second brain" or PKM-style system?

Not really. McPhee's coded-cards system comes closest, but it is a single-project filing tool, not a lifelong knowledge graph ¹⁶. Doctorow's blog is closest in spirit — accumulated public fragments that re-combine into new essays ²⁸. Most of the twelve treated notes as ephemeral feedstock for finished work, not as the work itself. Joan Westenberg's 2025 essay "I Deleted My Second Brain" is the contemporary version of the same instinct ³³.

Q: Was Hemingway really writing in pencil his whole career?

Mostly yes, for first drafts. He wrote standing up at a chest-high bookshelf with a typewriter on top, but drafted in pencil so each pass — handwritten, typed, proofed — was its own revision ⁹. He also tracked daily word counts on a chart taped to the wall, a habit predating modern word-tracking apps by sixty years ⁹.

Q: How many index cards did Nabokov actually use for Pale Fire?

Pale Fire's manuscript survives as 1,092 numbered cards ¹. The cards are lined Bristol, written in pencil with eraser-capped tips so revisions did not require new cards ⁷. Nabokov told Playboy in 1964 that "about three cards make one typewritten page" ⁶. Cards for Lolita are at the Library of Congress (Nabokov Papers, MSS-86440); cards for other novels are at the New York Public Library's Berg Collection ⁷.

Q: Why did Maya Angelou write in a hotel room instead of her own house?

She told the Paris Review that the bare hotel room stripped the day of biographical associations — no pictures, no family objects, no domestic cues. The room was a working cell with no past, which made the next sentence the only available action ²³. The constants were intentional: yellow pads, Bible, thesaurus, the same posture across the bed. The brain learned the cell.

Q: Is it expensive to copy any of these systems?

No. The most documented systems (Lamott, Didion, Nabokov, Hemingway, McPhee) used materials sold at any stationery store for less than $20 total — index cards, a pen, a notebook. Martin's WordStar 4.0 runs in a free DOSBox emulator. Doctorow's WordPress is free ²⁸. Maya Angelou's only extravagance was the hotel room itself, and many writers replicate her cell with a coffee-shop booth.

Q: Should fiction writers use the same system as nonfiction writers?

The twelve here split roughly evenly across fiction and nonfiction, and their methods do not separate by genre. Nabokov (fiction) and McPhee (nonfiction) both used index cards. Sontag (essays) and Highsmith (thrillers) both kept lifelong dual notebooks. Wolfe (both) and Doctorow (both) both used tight planning. Genre does not predict method. Temperament does — the planner-versus-pantser axis Zadie Smith named the Macro Planner and the Micro Manager ³⁴.

The closing

Hemingway's blue-backed notebook outlasted the Hôtel Ritz basement that stored it. Nabokov's cards outlasted the typewriter he dictated them through. Sontag's hundred notebooks outlasted the writer herself. The tool changes. The notebook does not. MNMNOTE (mnmnote.com) lives in your browser — markdown in, markdown out.

References

Grouped by tier. All URLs verified live as of 2026-05-15.

Primary sources (writers' own essays, books, interviews)

Mainstream press, magazine profiles, archive metadata

Industry blog, aggregator, and editorial-criticism context

Secondary aggregators and editorial-criticism context (verified against primary)

The Marginalian. "Susan Sontag on Writing." https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/25/susan-sontag-on-writing/. The Marginalian. "Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook." https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/. The Marginalian. "Why I Write: Joan Didion on Ego, Grammar, and the Creative Impulse." https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/10/16/why-i-write-joan-didion/. The Marginalian. "Zadie Smith on the Psychology of the Two Types of Writers." https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/09/12/zadie-smith-writing-that-crafty-feeling/. Farnam Street. "Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook." https://fs.blog/keeping-a-notebook/. Farnam Street. "Susan Sontag — How I Write." https://fs.blog/susan-sontag-how-i-write/. Famous Writing Routines. https://famouswritingroutines.com/. Famous Writing Routines. "Margaret Atwood's Writing Routine." https://famouswritingroutines.com/writing-routines/margaret-atwood-writing-routine/. The Story (Australia). "The daily writing routines of Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami and other famous writers." https://thestory.au/articles/daily-routines-famous-writers/. LA Review of Books. "Cogito Ergo Boom: Susan Sontag's Journals." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cogito-ergo-boom-susan-sontags-journals/. LA Review of Books. "Only Lovers Live in the Present: On the Notebooks of Patricia Highsmith." https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/only-lovers-live-in-the-present-on-the-notebooks-of-patricia-highsmith/. Slate. "Susan Sontag's Journals and Notebooks." https://slate.com/culture/2008/12/susan-sontag-s-journals-and-notebooks.html. Slate. "George R.R. Martin Writes on DOS-Based WordStar 4.0 Software from the 1980s." https://slate.com/technology/2014/05/george-r-r-martin-writes-on-dos-based-wordstar-4-0-software-from-the-1980s.html. Open Culture. "Neil Gaiman Talks Dreamily About Fountain Pens, Notebooks & His Writing Process." https://www.openculture.com/2019/12/neil-gaiman-talks-dreamily-about-fountain-pens.html. Open Culture. "The Notecards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Lolita." https://www.openculture.com/2014/02/the-notecards-on-which-vladimir-nabokov-wrote-lolita.html. Nabokov, V. (Summer–Fall 1967). "The Art of Fiction No. 40: Vladimir Nabokov." Interview with Herbert Gold. The Paris Review, Issue 41. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov. (Secondary Nabokov-on-method cross-reference; index-card composition quotes used in this essay are from the 1964 Playboy interview, not this Paris Review interview.) Salon. "George R.R. Martin Tells Conan Why He Writes on a DOS Word Processor." https://www.salon.com/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_tells_conan_why_he_writes_on_a_dos_word_processor/. TIME. "Here's Why George R.R. Martin Writes Game of Thrones on an Ancient DOS." https://time.com/99432/george-rr-martin-game-of-thrones-computer/. Rolling Stone. "George R.R. Martin Tells Conan His Secret Weapon: a DOS Computer." https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/george-r-r-martin-tells-conan-his-secret-weapon-a-dos-computer-230217/. TechCrunch. "George R.R. Martin Writes Everything In WordStar 4.0 On A DOS Machine." https://techcrunch.com/2014/05/14/george-r-r-martin-writes-everything-in-wordstar-4-0-on-a-dos-machine/. LitHub. "Every Great Writer Is a Great Deceiver: Vladimir Nabokov's Best Writing Advice." https://lithub.com/every-great-writer-is-a-great-deceiver-vladimir-nabokovs-best-writing-advice/. LitHub. "Joan Didion: Why I Write." https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/. Scraps from the Loft. "Nabokov: Playboy Interview (1964)." https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/vladimir-nabokov-playboy-interview/. Scraps from the Loft. "Joan Didion — On Keeping a Notebook." https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/books/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/. Writing Analytics. "Vladimir Nabokov on Writing." https://www.writinganalytics.co/quotes/672/. Writers Write. "George R.R. Martin Tells Conan He Writes Using WordStar 4.0." https://www.writerswrite.com/george-r-r-martin-tells-51620141. Writers Write. "Zadie Smith's 10 Rules For Writing Fiction." https://www.writerswrite.co.za/zadie-smiths-10-rules-for-writing-fiction/. ConanClassic. "George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor." https://conanclassic.com/video/george-r-r-martin-dos-program. YouTube. "George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor — CONAN on TBS." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM-3nWHg. NYPL. "Tom Wolfe papers." https://archives.nypl.org/mss/22833. W. W. Norton. Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks. https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324090991. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 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