[onlyrealcuzzo]

Alexandre Dumas serial published The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo - being paid by the word - which is why they're so long - but also extra impressive how good they turned out.

The stories were not finished while the beginnings were being published.

[xhevahir]

That's right, I was forgetting serialized novels. They were big, too.

That method of Dumas was how Dostoevsky worked, at least some of the time--not knowing exactly what he was doing in a novel until after its first chapters had already appeared in a magazine. Presumably his gambling debts had something to do with this habit of working, although he supposedly had a case of what they call "hypergraphia," and could produce an incredibly amount of writing in a short amount of time.