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

All right, so the key takeaway here is that you do not have to make every part of your novel work at once and especially not in your first draft.

Instead, I would rather you focus on the most important job of the current pass you're working on, knowing that you can always deepen, connect, and refine the other layers once more of the story exists.

All right, now last up is myth number five, and this one is getting stuck means something is wrong with me or my idea.

I see this one a lot when a manuscript stops working or when a writer gets stuck.

They often treat it as a judgment on themselves.

So they think things like, maybe I just chose the wrong idea or maybe my idea is stupid.

Maybe I'm not creative enough or I just don't have that natural born talent.

Or maybe the thought sounds like real writers sit down and probably already know what happens next.

There must be something wrong with me because I don't.

It usually starts there and then after a few false starts or maybe a few drafts that you've gotten stuck on, the inner voice starts to feel a little bit more personal.

So it starts to sound like, okay, well, maybe I'm just someone who loves books and I'll dream about writing for the rest of my life, but I'm just not the kind of person that can actually finish one, right?

So it starts to get a little bit more personal and sometimes a little bit more nasty, which is unfortunate.

And one thing I want to point out right away about this kind of interpretation is that it makes getting stuck in a draft feel like you're at the end of the road.

Like if your idea is quote unquote bad, then maybe you should just abandon the whole thing altogether.

Or if real writers don't struggle this way, then every difficult season or encounter that you have becomes more evidence that you're collecting that you just aren't a real writer, right?

We all know how this feels.

But I want you to know that getting stuck doesn't automatically mean that your idea is broken or that it's bad or that you lack what it takes.

Because more often than not, it just means that you've reached a part of your story that your current understanding or your current process hasn't prepared you to write yet.

So in other words, it's most likely a process problem.

What I mean by that is that maybe you started drafting before you understood what your story is really about.

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