Your Story Has Weight. It Deserves a Writer Who Can Handle It. (Downtown)
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Some stories are too complicated, too dark, or too true for most writers to navigate. The kind that involves real institutions, real wrongdoing, and real people who paid a price for doing the right thing. That's where I work.
I'm Tim Tolka, author, journalist, and screenwriter specializing in thrillers, crime dramas, police procedurals, and dark comedy with moral stakes. My work lives at the intersection of investigative research and character-driven storytelling, and I bring fifteen years of both to every project.
The foundation: In 2018, I published Blue Mafia, a 300-page biography of a civil rights lawyer whose work spurred two federal investigations into Ohio police departments — a story that took eight years to research, write, and edit. That project didn't just shape my voice. It showed me what rigorous, consequential storytelling requires, and it's what drove me into screenwriting.
What I Do
Screenwriting Collaboration
I co-write features and TV scripts, typically working from outlines, treatments, or early-stage ideas. If you have two pages and a vision, that's enough. I construct and structure complex plots, build characters with real contradictions, and deliver drafts you can take into a room. Credits include five TV scripts and six features across crime drama, police procedural, paranormal/true crime, period Western, and biopic.
Ghost-Writing and Memoir
I adopt voices for a living. I've written memoirs for a cop, a soldier, a surgeon, a daredevil, and several people whose stories required both discretion and craft. If you have a life worth documenting and need someone to shape it into a manuscript, I know how to disappear into your perspective.
Coverage and Story Consulting
For the past six years I've provided script coverage and story consulting for screenwriters, directors, and producers who want a reader who understands structure, genre, and the craft deeply enough to tell them exactly what's working and what isn't.
Why It's Different
I also conduct private investigations, which means when a story requires sourcing, verification, or tracking down information that isn't publicly available, I don't stop at the surface. That combination of investigative instinct and narrative skill is what makes my research-driven projects hold up, on the page and in the room.
Past collaborators include clients in the YouTube true crime space, video game developers, and independent producers developing projects in the US and internationally.
Not sure how to start, or whether we're the right fit?
Book a free 20-minute consultation. Bring whatever you have, a concept, a draft, a true story you've been sitting on for years. We'll figure out together what it needs and whether I'm the right person to help build it.