Savannah Gilbo

speaker

3,356 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 18 Aug

Savannah Gilbo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 5.

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Fiction Writing Made Easy with Savannah Gilbo | How to Write a Novel & Writing Advice · #258. 5 Myths Keeping You From Finishing Your First Draft · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

This is probably the most common explanation writers give for why they haven't finished.

If I had more time, if I had more discipline, maybe if I had more motivation, I'd finally get the thing done.

Now, of course, finishing a novel does take time and effort.

You have to sit down, put words on the page, and keep returning to your draft.

But more time only helps when you know how to use it.

What I mean by that is you can carve out an entire afternoon and still spend most of it rereading yesterday's pages, tweaking sentences, second-guessing your outline, or staring at the blinking cursor because you're not sure what should happen next.

So yes, although you have given your writing more time, very little of it goes to actually moving your draft forward.

So what tends to happen is then you assume that the answer is to push yourself harder.

You create a stricter schedule, raise your word count goal, or promise yourself that this is the week you'll stop making excuses.

But a stricter schedule or higher word count goal won't answer the questions that are keeping you stuck.

This is how writers can end up working on a novel for months or even years without getting much closer to the end.

It's not because they're not trying hard enough, it's just that their effort has nowhere clear to go.

So before you decide that you need more hours or that you need to become a more disciplined person,

I want you to think about what you're expecting your already limited writing time to accomplish.

Because many writers start outlining or drafting with an intriguing idea, but very little clarity about what their story is actually about.

So they hope that the outline or the draft itself will reveal what happens, where the story is headed, and how everything fits together.

But in reality, spending more time outlining or drafting may not solve the problem.

And that's because the writer is still working from an idea that hasn't been developed enough yet.

So more hours will just simply give them more time to wrestle with the same unanswered questions.

Now, I'm not saying that you need to have every detail of your story figured out before you start writing or outlining because you will always make new discoveries as you outline and draft.

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