12 Best Writing Podcasts for Storytellers

A good writing podcast does not replace the hard hour at the desk. It cannot make the next scene choose itself, or tell you whether a character’s silence is charged with grief or simply empty. But the best writing podcasts can keep a writer company at the right moment: while walking the dog, washing dishes, or circling a problem in a notebook that has resisted every tidy solution.

For writers of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and other speculative forms, that company matters. These genres ask us to build systems, histories, languages, and impossible places. Yet readers remember the feeling of being inside a story far longer than they remember the map. The shows below are worth hearing because they return, in different ways, to that central challenge: making invented things feel emotionally inhabited.

What Makes a Writing Podcast Worth Your Time?

A podcast can be informative and still be a poor fit for your work. Some are built around publishing news, some around productivity, some around close craft discussion. None of those approaches is wrong, but listening without a purpose can become another elegant form of avoidance. A conversation about plot may feel productive when what your draft really needs is one difficult paragraph written badly enough to exist.

The strongest shows offer more than rules. They make room for judgment. They reveal that a flat middle might be a structural problem, a character problem, or a question the writer has been avoiding. They also let you hear working writers disagree, revise their views, and describe the unglamorous mechanics behind finished work.

Think of this as a listening shelf, not a syllabus. Choose one or two podcasts that meet your present need. Leave the rest for another season of the work.

Best Writing Podcasts for Fiction Craft

Writing Excuses

Writing Excuses is compact, focused, and unusually useful when you need a clear way into a technical problem. Its episodes address character, plot, setting, revision, viewpoint, and the particular demands of genre fiction without treating craft as a collection of permanent laws.

For a worldbuilder, its value lies in its repeated concern with consequences. A magical ability, alien custom, or ruined city is not interesting merely because it is unusual. It becomes story material when it changes what people fear, desire, trade, hide, or sacrifice. Listen with a page of your own manuscript nearby, and test one idea against a live scene.

Helping Writers Become Authors

K.M. Weiland’s show is especially helpful for writers who want to understand story structure as an expression of inner change. The discussions of character arcs, scene design, and common narrative problems give language to an experience many writers know well: the sense that a draft has movement but no deeper direction.

That framework can be clarifying, particularly during outlining or revision. Still, it is a framework, not a verdict. Some stories move through transformation quietly, and some deliberately resist the clean shape of a conventional arc. Use the concepts to ask better questions of the work, rather than forcing every strange story to behave.

The Story Grid Podcast

The Story Grid Podcast approaches storytelling through analysis, often examining how scenes create value shifts, how genres make promises, and why an ending lands or fails to land. It can be demanding listening, which is part of its appeal.

This is a strong choice for writers who enjoy taking a story apart to see its joints. Horror writers may find its attention to expectation and payoff particularly useful. Terror needs more than a creature in the dark. It needs a reader to understand what safety looked like before it was broken.

Podcasts for Voice, Process, and a Sustainable Practice

I Should Be Writing

I Should Be Writing speaks directly to the emotional weather around writing: doubt, stalled projects, rejection, distraction, and the uneasy feeling that everyone else has figured out a path you somehow missed. It offers a humane counterweight to the idea that a serious writer must always sound certain.

That matters because creative paralysis is rarely solved by being scolded. Sometimes a writer needs permission to make a smaller promise: return to the chapter, write the scene that interests you, or name the fear beneath the procrastination. The work still has to be done. It is simply easier to do when shame is not sitting in the chair beside you.

The Writer Files

The Writer Files centers conversations with writers about habits, process, influences, and the long route from early impulse to completed work. It is less about copying routines than noticing how varied real creative lives can be.

One writer drafts before dawn; another needs a long stretch of silence; another discovers the novel through revision. Those differences are useful. They loosen the fantasy that there is one correct ritual, then return responsibility to where it belongs: finding a practice that lets you come back often enough to learn what the story is asking.

Write-minded

Write-minded brings together conversations about craft, creativity, and the lived reality of making books. Its range is part of the draw. A writer can encounter a practical discussion of revision beside a wider reflection on attention, ambition, or artistic identity.

For emerging writers, this breadth can make the writing life feel less like a locked room. For experienced writers, it can offer a reminder that technique and temperament remain intertwined. A scene is built from choices, but those choices are made by a person with memories, limits, tastes, and blind spots.

Best Writing Podcasts for the Road to Publication

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing is frank about queries, submission materials, agents, and the practical misunderstandings that can gather around publication. Writers preparing to send work out will find its directness useful, especially when the process starts to feel like a secret language spoken by everyone but them.

The best use of a show like this is concrete. Learn how to present a project clearly, then return to the manuscript. A brilliant query cannot carry a novel that has not yet found its own center. Nor should the business side drain all pleasure from the private, peculiar act of making the thing.

The Creative Penn Podcast

The Creative Penn Podcast covers the many practical dimensions of an author career, including publishing options, marketing, mindset, and changing tools. It is expansive, so it is best approached with a defined question rather than as a stream of information to absorb all at once.

Writers considering independent routes may find it particularly useful. Writers pursuing traditional publication can also benefit from its larger reminder: authorship involves choices beyond the sentence level. Those choices deserve care, but they should serve the work and the reader, not become a substitute for either.

The Writers’ Co-op

The Writers’ Co-op examines the freelance and professional side of writing with an eye toward money, boundaries, negotiation, and working conditions. Although its focus extends beyond fiction, its underlying subject is familiar to any artist trying to protect time and attention.

Speculative fiction often begins in obsession: a city beneath ice, an inherited curse, a machine that remembers its makers. Obsession is valuable, but it does not schedule itself. Listening to honest discussions of labor can help writers build the ordinary structures that give extraordinary work a chance to continue.

Podcasts for Close Reading and Literary Conversation

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing

First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing offers long-form conversations that linger over the actual texture of a writer’s work and thinking. Rather than reducing a book to a formula, it makes space for uncertainty, research, revision, and the unexpected routes through which a story becomes itself.

This is especially nourishing when your own project feels too odd or too private to explain. Many meaningful books begin as questions the writer cannot yet answer. Hearing serious conversation around process can help preserve that uncertainty long enough for it to become form.

The Mythcreants Podcast

The Mythcreants Podcast is a useful companion for writers interested in speculative storytelling, tropes, worldbuilding, and the assumptions stories carry beneath their surface. Its discussions can help a writer notice where familiar genre machinery has become automatic.

That does not mean every trope must be dismantled. A chosen family, a prophecy, a haunted house, or a fallen empire can still hold real power. The question is whether the story has discovered a living pressure inside the familiar shape. What does this prophecy cost this child? What has this empire taught people to call normal?

The Nerdette Podcast

The Nerdette Podcast is broader than a craft show, but its conversations with artists, thinkers, and cultural figures can feed the part of writing that begins before technique. It is a reminder that stories are not made only from writing advice. They are made from curiosity, contradiction, overheard phrases, and the stubborn details of the world.

For a writer deep in a draft, that wider contact can be restorative. A fictional planet needs more than a geology chart. It needs odd customs, bad jokes, inconvenient weather, private grief, and someone who notices the smell of rain on unfamiliar stone.

Build a Listening Practice, Not a New Distraction

There is no final ranking of the best writing podcasts because writers do not remain the same reader from month to month. During a first draft, you may need encouragement and permission to move forward. During revision, you may need structural precision. Before submitting, practical industry guidance may matter more than another conversation about inspiration.

Try pairing listening with action. After an episode, write down one question for your current project, not ten rules to remember. Then answer it on the page. If a discussion of setting makes you realize that your invented capital has no sounds after midnight, write a scene there. If an episode on character makes you see that your villain wants forgiveness rather than power, follow that thread until it complicates the plot.

The aim is not to become fluent in the language of craft. It is to make something a reader can enter and, for a while, believe in. Let a good podcast hand you a match. Then go back to the room where your story is waiting in the dark.