Welcome to the final post of the year! And what a year it’s been. As I look back on 2025, I’m filled with gratitude for the amazing conversations, creativity, and growth this writing community has shared. For me, this year felt like a time of tying up loose ends and completing long arcs. It was a season of transition and closure that’s opened the door for exciting new chapters ahead.
This was a big year for me. In some ways, it felt like maybe even the best year of my life. Just… goodness, you know. For most of it, I’ve felt incredibly healthy and happy and just deeply grateful for all the adventures that have brought me here and all the adventures yet to come.
In addition to getting to do a lot of traveling all over the country, I focused on settling into my new home and completing important projects.
- My biggest project this year was putting together a revised and expanded second edition of the Structuring Your Novel Workbook (to go with the second edition of the main book Structuring Your Novel that came out last year).
Structuring Your Novel Workbook (affiliate link)
- I also started what I intended as the “small” project of producing some fillable digital worksheets. This quickly became a huge project as I kept coming up with more and more ideas for worksheets I wanted to add!
- The audio version of Next Level Plot Structure came out. (FYI, still waiting on my narrator for an updated audio version of Structuring Your Novel).
- I had an incredible experience participating in the WorldShift online writing summit in August (stay tuned for info about next year!). I loved presenting on the deeper connections of plot/theme/character and was so inspired by everyone’s enthusiastic responses and interaction. I look forward to presenting again next year, and it has inspired and encouraged me in a lot of the projects I’m excited to be exploring and sharing with you soon!
- I was honored for Helping Writers Become Authors to receive its eleventh mention in Writer’s Digest‘s 101 Best Websites for Writers.
- And I had fun participating in another thoughtful video from StudioBinder.
I’m brimming with plans for next year. I’m still deep in the researching/outlining phase with my fantasy WIP Wildblood, taking my time and listening deeply as I go deeper and deeper with my own experiences and theories about storytelling.
In 2026, you can look for a lot of exciting new things here. For one thing, you’ll likely be seeing a whole new look for the website and my branding. I’m also planning to start sharing more classes. I eventually want to put together a master course that covers everything I teach about storytelling and will give you all the tools you need to understand how to write solid stories.
After the enthusiastic discussions in response to several articles I wrote last year about our collective hunger for a deeper, truer, and more mythically grounded storytelling, I’m also incredibly inspired and excited to be planning much deeper explorations of how we can write not just “technically good” stories, but stories that ignite and initiate ourselves and everyone who reads them.
Stay tuned! You can look for all this and more here next year! And if you’d like to hear more about my personal adventures and reflections on the past year, be sure to check back next week for my annual New Year’s post.
Some of My Top 10 Posts of 2025
And now, just in case you missed them (or want to revisit them):
1. What’s Happened to Modern Storytelling? (+ 6 Ways Storytelling Can Find Its Soul Again)
2. The 5 Types of Scene Endings Every Writer Must Master
3. Need a Good Book Editor? Top Up-to-Date Recommendations
4. 7 Ways to Watch and Read More Intentionally
5. Is This the Alternative to the Monomyth We’ve All Been Searching For?
6. Why Intentional Storytelling Matters in an Era of AI and Algorithm-Driven Content
7. Writing a Fall Arc: How to Show a Character’s Moral Decline
8. The Rules of Fiction: What They Are and What They’re Not
9. How to Make Your Fantasy World Feel Real: 6 Pillars of Organic Worldbuilding
10. Why All Stories Are Myth—and How They Transform Us
Story as Cosmology: Understanding Story as a Framework for Meaning
A Christmas Letter to My Fellow Storytellers
Gratitude and the Story We Share: A Thanksgiving Letter
How to Start Dictating Fiction (Even If You’ve Tried and Failed Before)
About K.M. Weiland | @KMWeiland
It’s been a great year for this blog. Happy New Year!
Thank you! I look forward to next year very much. 🙂 Happy New Year to you as well!
Hi Katie, those were all great posts! Many of them correspond with what I’ve been learning/experimenting with this year, especially number 7 on the list, “Writing the Fall Arc”. My portal fantasy book includes the downfall of the person who then becomes the villain, so that post really helped me.
You said to share the most memorable writing event, for me, in 2025. Hmm, writing wise, I started the portal fantasy in October, and it’s been AMAZING getting back to writing. I’d taken the summer off while trying to finish editing my Viking historical fiction novel, which I then published. It’s been a good year for me, and I hope it was good for you, also. Do you have any writing projects in mind for next year?
See you in 2026!
That’s so fun! Huge congrats on getting your book published. That’s amazing! I’m still gently working on my fantasy WIP Wildblood, but this year will be mostly focused on overhauling my business infrastructure to hopefully allow me more time for creative writing going forward. Happy New Year!
Thank you, Katie! Your podcasts have been an immeasurable help in understanding the *why* of why stories work (or don’t). Learning the 3-act structure has been tremendously helpful in learning to write stories and I can tell that the stories where I intentionally tried to hit the 3-act points are much stronger than when I didn’t.
Keep up the good work!