Alice Walker, the celebrated author of The Color Purple, has had her life laid bare in an exhibition at Emory University, Atlanta, in the Pulitzer prize-winner's home state of Georgia. The 200-odd items on display include her early writings, notebooks of ideas and even the quilt she made while writing her classic novel of black women in the American south of the 1930s. Scholars and fans alike will pick over every detail of Walker's life, giving every jotting and scribble meaning, pondering over the artefacts of her childhood.

It's quite understandable. I once stood spellbound for several long, quiet minutes in room 511 of the Ambos Mundos hotel in Havana. The centrepiece of the room was a glass case in which sat Ernest Hemingway's typewriter. With the distant sounds of the chaotic, anachronistic traffic drifting on the hot breeze, I was entranced by the thought that I was an invisible ghost from the far future, standing at Papa's shoulder as he bashed out his no-nonsense prose in the 1930s.

I had a similar feeling at Jack Kerouac's grave in Lowell, Massachusetts, sitting on a hot, airless day by the flat headstone laid into the lawn of the deserted cemetery. And in the boathouse at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire, the interior lovingly reconstructed to reflect just what Dylan Thomas would have seen as he sat there and pondered.

My name is David Barnett and I'm addicted to the minutiae of writers' lives. And I'm not alone. Had I the limitless funds enjoyed by the likes of Johnny Depp, I might well have bought Jack Kerouac's coat at auction, too. But without that sort of cash, I content myself with poring over the literary soft-porn of Eamonn McCabe's photographs, which appear weekly in the Guardian's Saturday Review section.

McCabe's Writers' Rooms series is a great fix for the literary junkie. Each week we see a desk, sometimes maniacally cluttered, sometimes obsessively tidy. It looks out on a vast lawn, or a distant woodland, or an achingly cool urban brick wall. There might be sticky-notes fringing a computer monitor, or stacks of A4 lined pads and a humbug tin of sharpened pencils. There is a wall-chart of plot-points and characters, linked by eye-watering Gordian knots of coloured string, or a pile of reference books which we risk eyestrain by trying to discern the titles of.

Now McCabe's photographs are being given the exhibition treatment: from today they are on display at – where else? – the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, spread across the rooms where the sisters penned their classics.

Jenna Holmes, arts officer at the Parsonage, knows exactly what addiction she is helping to feed. "One of the most exciting aspects of a visit to the Brontë Parsonage Museum is to see the very room in which the Brontës wrote their famous novels," she says, in the manner of a shady character leaning out of a darkened alleyway, promising one free hit of Martin Amis's sock drawer or Salman Rushdie's rotating pull-out larder. "With this new exhibition we can also offer a fascinating glimpse into the writing rooms of some of the most important contemporary writers working today."

They say that everyone has a book in them – that inside every bank clerk, desk jockey, street sweeper and traffic warden is a writer desperate to claw his or her way out. And that parasitical would-be literary superstar looks greedily through our eyes at the trappings and accoutrements of real, live, successful writers, and thinks: "Philip Pullman writes in a shed. I have a shed. Margaret Atwood has green curtains. Perhaps I should get some green curtains. James Patterson's writing room looks out on to Palm Beach in Florida. If I stand on a chair in the spare room, I can just about see the tide going out at Redcar. Their lifestyles are not unattainable. I can be like them."

Then we arrange our little space to look a little like that of JK Rowling, and set to work. But our desk mustn't look too similar to hers, because, one day, we are hoping that Eamonn McCabe will be coming round our houses to take photographs of our rooms. And when others are sitting greedily drinking in the details of our creative space, trying to divine the significance of that photograph or this row of books, then we'll finally know we've arrived.