The Literary Workshop Blog

I started blogging here 16 years ago today. Now I have decided to bring the Literary Workshop blog to a close. This is the 400th post on the blog, and I expect it to be the last one.

When I started the Literary Workshop Blog back in August 2010, I was just a couple years out of graduate school and had only a couple kids. A whole lot has changed since then.

When I started the blog, I didn’t set out to build an audience or promote a business or anything like that. Here’s how it happened: I used to post regularly on a woodworking forum called WoodNet, but the posts on that forum lasted only a year before being deleted. As an avid hand-tool woodworker, I enjoyed showing off my projects and trading woodworking advice with other traditional woodworkers. So I started this blog as an archive of the longer posts and projects I had put on that forum. Eventually the blog took on a life of its own. Internet forums declined in popularity, and I continued to learn about hand tools, make furniture, and discover traditional woodworking techniques. I’m a compulsive writer, so describing these things came easily to me. Part of the fun of starting a new project has often been planning the blog post(s) and photos that would feature it.

So what has changed in the last 16 years?

First, today’s media ecosystem is different. When I began the Literary Workshop Blog, most of the high-quality information on hand tools was still on forums and blogs, as well as in a few select magazines and books. If you wanted to work wood with hand tools, the information wasn’t going to find you. You had to read up on it. Now in 2026, the online space is flooded with short-form how-to videos, and once social media algorithms figure out that you’re interested in hand-tool woodworking, it will keep delivering that content to you automatically. The sheer amount of video content available is overwhelming. And a surprising amount really is fairly high in quality. That means there’s less demand for written content than their used to be. But I’m a writer, and I’m just not interested in creating video content. And even if you’re more of a reader than a video watcher (like I am), you can get very high quality content on hand tool woodworking from several good sources, like Lost Art Press and Mortise & Tenon Magazine.

I also maintain this blog at the pleasure of the WordPress platform, which I don’t control. Tomorrow the owners could decide to delete everything I’ve written over the past 16 years. If I were going to keep writing seriously about woodworking, I would want to publish it in a more stable, permanent form: a book. But I’ve written books, and I know what kind of time and expertise such a project takes. There are much better woodworkers than I am writing books right now, and I’m very grateful for them. I have neither the time nor the desire to compete with them for a publisher’s attention.

I’m also concerned about the rise of AI large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, which have taken advantage of all the free information on the internet and are able to synthesize it for users, often without regard to the credibility of the content, let alone the identity of the people (like me) who labored to produce that content. I am not interested in providing even more free content to feed those AI beasts.

But more importantly, my free time has become more limited of late. Writing about a project takes a significant amount of time, and the more time I devote to the writing, the less time I have for the woodworking itself. That’s one reason why I’ve gone from posting a couple times a month (at my peak) to posting just a few times a year.

If you’ve never tried to write up a project for a magazine article or a blog post (or done a video shoot of it), it’s hard to imagine how much extra time it takes to do the content creation on top of the actual woodworking. I estimate that writing a high-quality series of blog posts about a project can add a good 50% to the total time the project takes. If the project is really involved, doing the content creation can easily double the time. So if it was a 12-hour project, but I want to document each step and write up a series build-along posts, it’s now an 18-hour project, at least.

These days, I don’t have a lot of time for woodworking itself. Most of my kids are teenagers, and I’m always running them to practice or rehearsal, or attending a game or a show they’re in. And my oldest now has kids of her own, so my wife and I are having fun doing the grandparent thing. I’m also in a leadership position in my local church, which is an honor but also a big time-commitment. And my current job doesn’t allow me to step away from work during school breaks like my previous job did. All in all, it’s a good phase of life! But I have fewer stretches of uninterrupted time in which I can get a project done. Woodworking is still important to me, so if I’m going to spend any time woodworking at all, I can’t also be committed to writing about it.

Besides, I feel like I’ve said pretty much everything I wanted to say about woodworking and related topics over the years. The really important things I’ve learned and shared here can be summed up pretty easily:

• Make things you need. You get started by figuring out what you need, learning some skills, and trying to make it work with the tools and materials you have most readily available.
• Read widely. You can learn things about your craft from the most unlikely of authors.
• Sharpen your tools. Sharp fixes everything.
• Simplicity is a virtue. You can do so much with a small kit of essential tools.
• Use what you have. Most jobs don’t require new tools. You may already have something that will get the job done.
• Keep your eye out for good material. There is a lot of good stuff out there if you know what you’re looking for.
• Be picky about what you keep. There’s a lot of junk that’s not worth taking home or holding on to.
• Quality matters. Spend the money to get the good tool, and spend the time to make the joint fit just right.
• Specialize. There are so many sub-fields in woodworking, and nobody can learn them all. Pick just a few and get really good at them. Skills in one sub-field will transfer over to another.
• Build relationships, not just projects. It’s good to bring people into your process and to share what you have with others.
• Selling your work will change everything about your craft. You may or may not like the changes.
• Learn by imitation and experimentation. Find excellent models to imitate.

I do want to say thank-you to you, my readers, especially those of you who have taken the time to post encouraging comments on posts, or to ask follow-up questions. The writing comes easier when I know there will be at least a few people reading. And if you find yourself wanting to read more of my writing, you can always go back to the very beginning of this blog and start reading from there! A lot of the pictures are now gone from my earlier posts, but many of the really important photos remain.

If you run across a post you like, but you find broken links and/or missing photos, please post a comment letting me know. If I have time (and if the photos still exist), I’ll try to update the post with the missing material. And if you want to interact with me about woodworking, I am willing to reply to new comments on old posts, at least for the time being.

Eventually, though, I will close down users’ ability to comment on posts and turn this blog into a true time-capsule. I have no idea how long it will remain accessible to other people. I suppose it could still be floating in a digital archive a century from now. Maybe in a couple hundred years some historian or anthropologist will stumble upon one of my posts and discover something really interesting about the Hand-Tool Woodworking Revival of the early twenty-first century. Or maybe some distant descendant of mine will get interested in genealogy and discover more about his or her ancestors than anybody really needed to know. Or maybe a freak solar flare will obliterate this whole blog before the end of the year. There’s no telling how long anybody’s writing is really going to last.

Even though I won’t be writing new blog posts anymore, I’m not really going away. I’ll still be right here, doing the things that I’ve always written about: reading books, building furniture with hand tools, making spoons and spatulas, and spending quality time with my wife and kids.

Farewell!

Stephen J. Schuler

Springfield, Ohio