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 · last 12 months

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

And because prose like that is what we see on the page, it's easy to assume that beautiful writing is what makes a story resonate with readers and it's what makes a novel good.

But the problem with this belief, aside from the fact that it's not true, is that this belief sends writers straight to the sentence level.

So when a chapter feels flat or when they start losing momentum, they end up polishing the same pages again and again, hoping that if they polish their prose and maybe just change a few words and sharpen how they're saying something, they hope that that will make the story work too.

or that it will make their draft look like the novels they read.

Now, I totally get why this is tempting, right?

Because sentence-level revision can feel really productive because the improvement is right there immediately on the page in front of us.

Compare that to something like figuring out why the story stalled in the first place, whether that's because your character lacks a clear goal or the conflict in your story isn't escalating, or...

one of the other various reasons it could be, right, that is less obvious and often harder work and more uncomfortable work to do.

So again, this is why writers default to polishing chapters and scenes that already exist, while the rest of the novel remains unclear and unwritten.

Now, real quick, I want you to just think about a book that you love and that you just couldn't put down.

I'm guessing that you kept turning the pages because you wanted to know whether the character would get what they wanted, you wanted to know what it would cost them, and what they were going to do when things inevitably got worse.

And that pull or that desire to keep turning the pages, that comes from the story that's well crafted underneath the sentences.

So again, a character to care about who has a meaningful goal, who's facing obstacles and conflict and has something real at stake and probably ultimately changes by the end, right?

That's what pulls you in.

Now, beautiful prose can absolutely strengthen that experience, but beautiful prose cannot create that experience on its own.

If there's no story underneath the sentences, if your reader doesn't understand what the character wants or why these moments that you're showing matter, then polishing the language isn't going to do anything for you.

That's why I say a lot in this podcast that your main job in a first draft is not to make every sentence beautiful.

It's to get the story down and move the story forward all the way to the end.

and yes your prose will need attention eventually but polishing works best and is more efficient more constructive once you have a complete story that works and is ready to polish all right so the key takeaway here is that beautiful prose can certainly make a strong story more vivid and enjoyable but beautiful prose alone cannot make up for a lack of story underneath the sentences

And remember that during a first draft, focusing on moving the story forward and getting to the end needs to come before perfecting the pages you've already written.

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