Fiction Writer’s Toolshed | Practical Tools for Authors
You have half-finished drafts. You keep restarting a project or rewriting its opening. Maybe there’s a growing pile of stories you’ll write someday, or one particular piece you just can’t get moving.
That’s the kind of work I want to help with in Fiction Writer’s Toolshed. This is a hands-on training podcast for fiction writers who want practical tools for diagnosing problems, building their skills and finishing more work.
I think beginning and intermediate writers will find it most useful. If you’ve been writing for years and still love talking craft, there may be something here for you too.
In this first episode, I introduce myself and two principles that guide the show: sharing my current best approach and showing how the sausage is made.
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Fiction Writer’s Toolshed
If You Write Fiction This Podcast is For You - Here's Why | ep 001
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A little about me
I’m Tim Kearney. I’ve been writing in one form or another since I was a teenager, making up lore, names and worlds. I still have notebooks of that stuff in my garage. I should pull them out and go through them sometime.
Over the years, I’ve worked in fantasy, science fiction, horror, tabletop RPG books, short fiction, some comics, comedy, instructional writing and SEO. I’ve also co-written a couple of full musicals, one of which was staged.
When I recorded this launch episode in January 2026, I’d spent more than 4,000 hours writing fiction and nonfiction since going full-time as a professional writer in 2020. I’d completed more than 40 fiction projects over the previous ten years.
I’m not a bestseller. I don’t have formal degrees, and I’m not here to sell you one true way to write. What I can bring is experience making mistakes, finishing projects and looking back at where I was getting stuck.
The pit: when you have to do the thing
There’s a point in a creative project that I call the pit.
The fun brainstorming has ended. You’ve imagined what the project could be. Now you have to actually do the thing.
That’s where I’ve seen projects fall apart. I’ve spent years learning how to get across that pit, often through painful mistakes. Finishing hasn’t always been fun, and I haven’t always felt inspired. But getting to the end has helped me understand where I was stuck and why.
This show is about sharing the tools I’ve found along the way, so you can build skills for doing the work when possibility has to become something real.
Writing advice can mix two different things
There’s a lot of excellent writing advice out there. Here’s a pattern I kept running into: useful craft principles and tools often come mixed with the advising writer’s personal preferences.
The advice rarely tells you which is which. I don’t think the person giving it always knows. I didn’t recognize it in my own thinking for a long time.
So you read a writing book, watch a series or join a community. Some of the advice works for you. Some of it feels like something you’re creatively allergic to. You don’t know why.
It’s easy to assume you’re the problem. I did.
What I wanted was a clearer path: a way to figure out what was going wrong and what I could try next. That’s what I want to build here. I want to separate craft from personal preference and turn vague, sage-sounding advice into tools we can actually use.
I want to demystify writing without sterilizing it. There’s something beautiful about this work. Understanding more of how it happens can help us make things without taking that beauty away.
That’s why I chose Toolshed. We’re here to build things you and I can use.
My current best approach
Everything I share on the show is what I call my current best approach, or CBA. I learned that phrase and concept from game designer Eddy Webb.
It means what I think works right now, given what I know right now. That includes my experience, experiments, projects I’ve finished and projects I couldn’t finish because of mistakes or things that went wrong.
The word current leaves room to learn. Tools change. Processes change. My thinking and experience change, and yours will too.
When I update a tool, replace a method or change my mind, I’ll do my best to say so explicitly. An old tool doesn’t become bad just because it stops serving me. It might be exactly what someone else needs at their stage of the work.
I want to show you what I’m using now, why I’m using it, and where it’s helped or failed me. Even the way I structured this first podcast episode is a current best approach: what I thought worked for how I was recording at the time.
I encourage you to test the tools and adapt them. Build your own current best approach as a writer. Use what helps with the work in front of you, and stay open to changing it as you learn.
Show how the sausage is made
The other principle is showing how the sausage is made.
When a project is finished, we talk about it from a different place than when we were in the middle. We remember the highlights and the low points. But the everyday friction can fade into a cleaner, more mythologized story of how the work happened.
I do this myself. We’re storytellers. Our brains are used to editing and arranging a narrative. The finished account can be incomplete even when we’re trying to tell it honestly.
That matters for writers who haven’t been through the process yet. You can end up comparing your messy reality with someone else’s polished account and wondering why your work doesn’t look like that.
The day-to-day reality of writing is often repetitive and uncertain. It’s full of small decisions that don’t feel dramatic but matter a lot.
As often as I can, I want to show that part of the work. Sometimes that may mean talking through a problem before I know the solution. It may mean a rough recording into my phone, or telling you about a day when the writing is hard and I don’t feel confident.
If I realize halfway or three-quarters through a project that something needs to change, I want to talk about it then: what needs to change, how it feels and what I’m going to do.
My hope is to create a record people can return to and hear how projects developed in those ordinary moments. The process matters while we’re living it, as well as when we can look back and say what worked.
Build a toolbox you can use
I want to help you finish more work and understand why something isn’t working. I want you to build a toolbox you can use without depending on me or anyone else.
I’m not promising miracles or shortcuts. I’m promising honesty, practical tools and an attempt to shorten a learning curve I had to work through myself.
At the show’s launch, these are some of the ways I want to do that:
- Core skills. Break fiction writing into pieces we can practice and improve, like a writer’s gym targeting different muscles.
- Q&A. Give my answers to common writing problems.
- Process walkthroughs. Work on my own fiction and explain what I’m doing and why.
- Creative projects. Explore ideas for things we might make together.
- Interviews. Talk with working writers about what helps them, what doesn’t, and the tools they use.
What matters to me is that listening helps you return to your own writing. I hope finishing more things helps you feel the confidence that comes from doing the work.
If you’d like to move from this introduction to a specific writing problem, 6 Elemental Pieces of Mastering Fiction Writing -- Part 2 offers signs to look for and exercises for the area that fits.
Take whatever tools you find useful and use them for as long as they’re getting the job done.
The Make Existian Toast
Before we go, grab whatever beverage you have nearby and join me in the Make Existian Toast.
May you slay false perfection, the old foe of done.
May you make all you dream of, and let making be fun.
And may you count who can make what you make -- only one.
Sláinte.
Fiction Writer’s Toolshed: Practical Tools for Authors is a Make Exist podcast hosted by Tim Kearney. It offers hands-on training for fiction writers to diagnose writing problems, build their skills, and finish more work.