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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Fiction Writing Made Easy with Savannah Gilbo | How to Write a Novel & Writing Advice · #257. Stuck in Chapter One or the Messy Middle? What Your Stuck Point Reveals · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

If your protagonist is up against a system, they might start handing down harsher and harsher consequences.

If they're operating within a dangerous environment, it might just get harder and harder to survive, right?

And then we have internal fears and misbeliefs and wounds on top of that, right?

So you have a lot of things you can play with, and the specific form of conflict can change from scene to scene, but the effect should be the same.

Each new obstacle your character faces makes their goal harder to reach and forces your character to respond in a new way.

That's what's going to give the middle of your story its momentum.

Your protagonist makes a move, the opposition answers, the situation shifts, and the next choice is harder than the last one.

All right, so if you are stuck somewhere deep in the messy middle, the fix is to look past what your protagonist is doing and develop what's actively pushing back against them.

So dig into your antagonist a bit more.

What do they want or what are they naturally creating just by existing?

How does your antagonist respond when your protagonist makes progress?

What new problem does each attempt create?

And how can it close off the easy options and force the harder choices?

Because when your protagonist's goal runs into opposition that keeps escalating, the middle is going to stop feeling like a string of scenes that you just have to fill with random stuff.

The conflict's going to keep changing, keep escalating, and that's going to create the next set of actions that need to happen.

All right, so that is my suggestion if you are stuck in the messy middle.

Now let's step back and put all this together because what I want you to notice is that these aren't necessarily three unrelated problems.

They're really three layers of what I call your story's foundation.

First, you need an actual story, not just an interesting situation.

Then you need a protagonist with a concrete goal that can drive the story forward.

Showing 1161–1180 of 3,356 · page 59 of 168