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 · #261. 5 Mistakes Writers Make Using the Save the Cat! Beat Sheet · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

And so what tends to happen when you assume that every beat needs to become one scene, then you can end up padding the smaller beats that don't really need a bunch of space, or you can end up rushing through larger sections before they've podcast-host

have had enough time to properly develop. podcast-host

And so what this really creates is a pacing problem that can be hard to spot until you step back and come back around and read your draft as a whole with fresh eyes. podcast-host

So if this mistake resonates, then I want you to pause and ask yourself is the beat I'm currently working on a moment within a scene, a major turning point scene, or a larger section that needs to unfold across multiple scenes? podcast-host

And if you're not sure how to decide this for yourself, podcast-host

yourself, then I am going to link to some older episodes that I did where I broke down every single section of the Save the Cat beat sheet and talked through this exact thing. podcast-host

So there's four episodes in total and I will link to each of them in the show notes below. podcast-host

Alright, so that is mistake number three, treating every beat as if it's an individual scene. podcast-host

Now mistake number four is writing the fun and game section with no conflict. podcast-host

This podcast-host

This is another one I see all the time, especially when I used to edit manuscripts that were finished. podcast-host

I would see fun and games sections that just had little to no conflict. podcast-host

And this mistake is also easy to make, right? podcast-host

The beat is called fun and games, so the name makes the section sound like a break from the harder parts of the story. podcast-host

But no matter which version of the Save the Cat beat sheet you look at, whether it's the original version for screenwriters by Blake Snyder or Jessica Brody's Save the Cat Writes a Novel, you'll hear them talk about delivering the promise of the premise in this section. podcast-host

And what they typically mean by that is that this section, the fun and games section, is really about delivering the experience that your readers came to the story for. podcast-host

So if you're podcast-host

If you're writing, let's say a romance, then this is where readers get to spend more time with the two characters in this central relationship. podcast-host

For the reader, that is definitely fun in games, right? podcast-host

If you're writing a mystery, this is where the investigation really kicks off and gets underway. podcast-host

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