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

Others will just jot down a few signposts or a few key points on like one piece of paper and they'll figure out the rest as they draft.

That is totally fine as well.

Either way though, I really do recommend trying to flesh out your answers to these five questions.

Whether you identify as someone who likes to plot your whole novel or outline the whole thing, whether you're a pantser who likes to discover as you write, or whether you fall somewhere in between those two extremes.

Alright, so again, any approach will work, but I do recommend starting with your story's foundational elements.

And the reason this is so important is because when your foundational elements are solid and they're connected and they're working together, then no matter how you approach the page, whether you like to outline or whether you like to just start drafting, whatever you want to do next, it's going to start feeling less like guesswork and a lot more like execution.

And what I mean by that is that you'll have enough clarity on what your story is really about, again, those foundational elements, that you can show up to the page and actually execute that story and have fun with it rather than losing all of your really precious writing time to thinking about these elements and rethinking about these elements when you're in chapter three, chapter five, or chapter 11, right?

So it becomes a lot more about execution than guesswork.

All right, now I do want to speak to the plotters a little bit because like I said earlier, I think outlining is great.

I do highly recommend creating some kind of outline, but there is a danger to that as well because you can get stuck in the outlining phase, right?

So if you're one of those people and you're still telling yourself that you are getting ready, then the question I want you to think about is, are you still discovering something useful about your story or are you just polishing what you already know?

Okay, so are you still discovering something useful about your story with all this planning and preparation work you're doing?

Or are you just polishing what you already know?

And if you're still fleshing out the basic shape of your story or the foundational elements like we just talked about, then keep going because that is real work.

But if you're mostly just rearranging notes or refining the same ideas or hunting for one more resource to make you feel ready, then take this podcast episode as your sign.

You have enough and it's probably time to start writing.

And here's the part that takes the pressure off of that idea.

Because once you start, you don't have to stop planning.

Your outline, your notes, your ideas, they're all allowed to keep changing and growing and sharpening as your story comes into focus.

So as you draft, just fold whatever you discover back into your plan so it grows right alongside your pages.

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