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

Who's your character?

What do they want and why?

What conflict gets in their way and things like that.

But that does not mean you have to have every detail figured out or that you have to produce a perfect draft on your first try.

Now let's back up a second and talk about why we tend to expect this of ourselves.

And this expectation comes partly from reading published novels.

Because when we're in the reader's seat, when we're reading a book, things like the plot, the character arc, the theme, the pacing, and the prose...

They are all working on the page together at the same time from our experience as a reader, right?

So as a reader, we see the finished result.

We do not see the separate rounds of discovering what the story is about, creating an outline if that's in the writer's process, drafting the novel start to finish, and then revising it probably multiple times, right?

We don't see any of that that goes into the finished product.

So I think that's where this expectation comes from.

And then we sit down and we expect our first draft to look like that.

But what I've learned after more than a decade of working with writers one-on-one and in my Notes to Novel course is that writers rarely solve every part of a novel equally well in one pass.

And what I mean by this is that you might draft complete scenes that get the plot and the external consequences on the page even if the dialogue is rough and the scenes are lacking interiority.

Or you might be someone who sketches your scenes almost like a screenplay so they're mostly filled with dialogue, entrances, exits, and basic stage direction and then return later to add narration, description, and emotional depth.

Everyone's process will look different and no matter how you tackle it, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.

It just means you're building your story in layers which is exactly what you should be doing.

And then once your full draft exists and you've gotten to the end and now you understand your story better...

Then you can return to those thinner layers in each scene and make all the pieces work together a little bit more deliberately.

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