Novelty pencils. Deluxe notebooks. Coffee mugs with witty sayings printed on them. 

If you’ve ever shopped for—or received gifts as—a writer, you’ve seen all the low-hanging fruit. Writing is such a personal thing, it can feel impossible to figure out how to gift something that will actually be useful. 

Short of buying someone a laptop, it can feel as if all you can do is gesture toward the fact you know someone writes. Then they have to smile and pretend to love whatever goofy joke gift you got them, which will inevitably end up untouched in their desk drawer. 

Luckily there are easy and almost universally useful gifting ideas for the writer in your life. 

Coffee Shop Gift Cards

One of the many lessons we learned during the worst of the COVID-19 lockdowns is that it can be very difficult to set up a workable home office. And some people will always concentrate better when they’re out of the house. 

Lots of writers prefer camping out at their local coffee shop to work, settling into a cozy atmosphere with familiar baristas, fellow regulars, and just enough white noise to help them focus. 

But, of course, a coffee shop is a business, and most coffee shops will require you to actually buy something if you’re going to take up a table. If you’re a respectful patron who likes to spend most of the day out at a coffee shop, you’ll also buy a little something new every few hours to continue justifying your use of the space. 

While a day of coffee and pastries might not look like much on the surface, those costs can add up over the week. 

So the perfect gift for the writer in your life? A gift card to their favorite coffee shop! If you have the budget, make it a hefty one, and check with the shop to make sure it doesn’t expire. And if the person you’re shopping for prefers quiet to the hustle and bustle of a café, you can get them a gift card to a local coworking space instead. 

Bookshop Event Tickets

A gift card to the local bookshop is such a perfect gift for anyone, writers or not, that it doesn’t warrant listing in a gift guide. 

But independent bookshops do more than sell books; they’re community spaces that host author signings, book launches, panels, and all kinds of bookish events. If you live in a larger city, those events might even be ticketed, especially for more famous authors going out on tours. 

Depending on how your local shop does events, you might be able to purchase a gift card for the amount of an event ticket so that the recipient can cash it in whenever they like. Or you might be able to look ahead on their event calendar and buy tickets directly if it’s close enough to the actual event. 

Book events are the perfect kind of gift—the sort of thing the recipient would love but often wouldn’t go to the trouble of buying for themselves. Bigger events like Comic-Con and rare book fairs can also be great gift-giving opportunities, depending on what your recipient enjoys and if they are available to travel. 

Office Amenities

Even if you’re gifting a fellow writer, people’s processes and chosen tools are too personal for all but their closest friends and family to know. 

However, whether a writer uses a laptop or a pen and paper, whether they’re a regular at the local coffee shop or write from their couch in their pajamas, writing is in the same category as office work. Which means the same things that make your home office nice are going to be beneficial for someone doing creative work. 

There are deluxe light bulbs that connect to an app on your phone, where the user can change the color and temperature of the light. If you’ve never tried one, a stand for your laptop can really make a difference for your physical comfort over a long day of typing. On top of that, a nice Bluetooth keyboard can be the perfect finishing touch for a lovely work setup. You can buy mug warmers that keep coffee hot, comfortable noise-cancelling headphones for writing music, and protective sleeves to keep a computer safe from bumps and weather when taking it on the go. 

Give the Gift You’d Want to Receive

Even though the process of writing is personal, it’s easy enough to imagine what a writer would love to unwrap; just think of what you’d be excited to have for yourself! 

Think of what makes you feel comfortable, what you love having but hate paying for, and what you’d like to have, even if you struggle to get around to getting it. It can feel impossible to give thoughtful gifts to everyone in your life, but a little bit of care and creativity can make any gift at any budget memorable. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn with her husband and her dog. When not writing or reading, she is a fiber and textile artist who sews, knits, crochets, weaves, and spins.