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 · #256. Why “Just Start Writing” Can Be Terrible Advice for New Writers · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

It shows you where your idea is thin, where your character's choices don't hold up yet, where you might have plot holes, and where the story in general needs more development than you realized.

So that part is completely true and I think this is what the advice is based on.

The problem is that people hand out that advice like a universal cure to every writer at every stage as if when you act on the advice doesn't matter and it does.

So let me paint you two completely different pictures of how this tends to play out in real life.

Because in both of these scenarios, the writer ends up stuck for reasons they don't fully understand.

So scenario one, I want you to imagine a new writer who takes this advice to just start writing completely at face value.

They sit down, they open their document, and they literally just start writing.

They don't have any kind of real sense of what their story is yet.

Maybe they have a few characters in mind, a handful of scenes, and maybe a vague idea of the ending, and also a lot of enthusiasm.

And so at first, this probably feels really magical, right?

The first chapter just pours out of them.

They're discovering their characters, exploring their story world, and just falling in love with the whole thing.

But then a few chapters in, things start to get a little bit wobbly.

The plot wanders somewhere they didn't intend, the protagonist feels really inconsistent, their scenes start feeling repetitive or thin or just straight up boring, and that ending that they could picture so clearly at the start, well now they have no idea how to get there.

So what usually happens?

Well, they go back to chapter one and they think, maybe if I just get this opening right, the rest of my book will click into place.

Then six months later, they've rewritten that first chapter 17 times and they're no closer to the end than the day they started.

And sometimes this means they stop writing.

Maybe that's all together or maybe this story just joins the folder of other almost novels.

But either way, they've stopped.

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