#259. How to Finish a Novel With Kids at Home & Limited Writing Time
episodePreviously titled “#259, How to Finish a Novel With Kids at Home & Limited Writing Time” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026
Fiction Writing Made Easy with Savannah Gilbo | How to Write a Novel & Writing Advice
25 min
1 speaker
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What are the common roadblocks that keep writers stuck and how can I get a free guide to overcome them?
Writing a novel can feel frustrating when you keep getting stuck in the same patterns, whether that's struggling to find time, rewriting the same chapters, or getting overwhelmed by too much advice. To help you out, I created a free guide called Five Writing Roadblocks Keeping You Stuck and How to Break Through. This guide will help you identify what's really slowing you down and find a clearer path forward. You can grab that for free at savannagilbo.com forward. slash roadblocks. One more time that's savanna gilbo.com forward slash roadblocks. We will also put that link for you in the show notes. Now let's get into the episode. You've probably told yourself you'll write a book when things settle down, when the baby sleeps through the night, when the kids get a little bit older, or when you finally have the kind of uninterrupted time that quote unquote real writers seem to have.
But if finishing your novel depends on life becoming quieter first, then let's just be real, you could be waiting for years. So in today's episode, I'm sharing five ways to keep moving forward in the small Imperfect windows that your life gives you, all so that you can make real progress on your novel, even when your schedule never looks the way you hoped it would. Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy Podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo and I'm here to help you write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming. So each week I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable, and step-by-step strategies that you can implement in your writing right away.
So whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft, this podcast is for you. So pick up a pen and let's get started. Today. We're talking about how to finish a novel when you're raising your kids and your writing time is limited, it's unpredictable, and it's frequently interrupted. Because one of the hardest parts isn't simply finding the time to write. It's that the time you do find might look nothing like you imagined and nothing like you see other people experiencing on Instagram. For example, maybe you get 20 minutes while your child is at soccer practice, and then you get nothing. For the next three weeks. Maybe nap time ends much earlier than expected one day, or maybe you finally establish some kind of routine that works only to have a kid get sick, a school break that you need to worry about, or just a new season of family life that makes that routine impossible.
Now, when this keeps happening, it's very easy to conclude that your life is simply too unpredictable to support something as big and as demanding as writing a novel. Novel, or that maybe you'll have to wait until this season passes before you can give it a real serious try. But after more than a decade of coaching fiction writers, I've watched people finish novels in the middle of full, busy, and unpredictable lives. Not because their schedules suddenly became perfect or had a little more wiggle room, mainly because they learned how to use the windows of time that they do have, they learned how to return to the story after an eruption. And they learn to let small imperfect progress count. And that's what the five tips in today's episode are designed to help you do.
None of them require you to turn every spare minute into writing time or pretend that raising kids isn't exhausting. They're more about creating a flexible way of writing that can exist alongside the rest of your life. And they're about helping you continue to move forward toward the end, even when that movement is slow. Slower or messier than you've imagined. So let's dive right in, starting with the first tip. And the first tip is to know what you're working on before you sit down to write. Because here's what tends to happen: any small pocket of time you have gets a whole lot smaller when you spend most of it just trying to remember where you left off or where your story is even heading. You know how this goes.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
1 identifiedMore from 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
#260. Student Spotlight: From Stuck at 25k Words to a Finished Draft With Lindsay Sfara
#258. 5 Myths Keeping You From Finishing Your First Draft
#257. Stuck in Chapter One or the Messy Middle? What Your Stuck Point Reveals
#256. Why “Just Start Writing” Can Be Terrible Advice for New Writers
#255. Student Spotlight: How Grace Draven Learned to Write Faster (Without Sacrificing Quality)