Why You Might Be Stuck

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If you've been working on the same novel for months or even years, you might have started to wonder whether you need more time, more discipline, or maybe just a better idea or more talent. But what if the real reason you haven't finished is that you've been trying to solve the wrong problem? Well, in today's episode, I'm breaking down five common beliefs that keep writers stuck and what your draft actually needs from you instead. 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.

Five Myths Behind Unfinished Drafts

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In today's episode, we're talking about five common beliefs that can quietly keep you from finishing your first draft. Because when you've been working on the same novel for months or maybe even years, it's natural to start looking for an explanation. You might assume you don't have enough time, or maybe that you need to be more disciplined, or that you still have way too much to learn before you're ready to start writing. And then when none of these solutions seem to work, it's easy to start wondering whether the problem is you or whether your story idea simply isn't good enough. But in many cases, writers aren't stuck because they lack talent, commitment, or a good idea. They're stuck because they've mistaken the symptom for the cause. And what I mean by that is they keep trying to solve problems that aren't actually responsible for them being stuck. So in this episode, we're gonna look at five of the most common myths that keep writers stuck, how each one gets in the way, and what's actually true instead, also that you can make forward progress towards finishing your draft. Alright, so let's dive right in, starting with myth number one.

Myth One More Time Fixes It

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And myth number one is if I had more time or tried harder, then maybe I'd finish my draft. This is probably the most common explanation writers give for why they haven't finished. If I had more time, if I had more discipline, maybe if I had more motivation, I'd finally get the thing done. Now, of course, finishing a novel does take time and effort. You have to sit down, put words on the page, and keep returning to your draft. But more time only helps when you know how to use it. What I mean by that is you can carve out an entire afternoon and still spend most of it rereading yesterday's pages, tweaking sentences, second guessing your outline, or staring at the blinking cursor because you're not sure what should happen next. So, yes, although you have given your writing more time, very little of it goes to actually moving your draft forward. So what tends to happen is then you assume that the answer is to push yourself harder. You create a stricter schedule, raise your word count goal, or promise yourself that this is the week you'll stop making excuses. But a stricter schedule or higher word count goal won't answer the questions that are keeping you stuck. This is how writers can end up working on a novel for months or even years without getting much closer to the end. It's not because they're not trying hard enough, it's just that their effort has nowhere clear to go. So before you decide that you need more hours or that you need to become a more disciplined person, I want you to think about what you're expecting your already limited writing time to accomplish. Because many writers start outlining or drafting with an intriguing idea, but very little clarity about what their story is actually about. So they hope that the outline or the draft itself will reveal what happens, where the story is headed, and how everything fits together. But in reality, spending more time outlining or drafting may not solve the problem. And that's because the writer is still working from an idea that hasn't been developed enough yet. So more hours will just simply give them more time to wrestle with the same unanswered questions. Now, I'm not saying that you need to have every detail of your story figured out before you start writing or outlining because you will always make new discoveries as you outline and draft. But whether you outline or not, you do need to develop enough of your story's foundation to support a full-length novel. That means understanding things like what your protagonist wants and why, what stands in their way, and where the central conflict is headed, all so that your time and effort have somewhere useful to go. So the key takeaway here is that finishing a novel, of course, it takes time and effort, but adding more of either won't help if your idea hasn't been developed enough to outline or draft effectively. So before pushing yourself harder, just make sure that you've built enough of your story's foundation for your effort to actually move it forward.

Myth Two Learning Replaces Writing

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All right, now let's move on to myth number two, which is I just need to learn a little bit more before I feel ready to write. Now, most of the writers I work with are excellent students and they love learning. They care deeply about their craft, and so when they get stuck, their instinct is to often buy another craft book, listen to another podcast, or try a different plotting method. And no judgment on this because I am guilty of this as well. It also makes a lot of sense, right? Because learning about writing and learning about our craft is very valuable. But the problem is that learning or consuming more craft advice can quietly become a way of postponing the moment that you actually have to apply what you've learned to your own story. Now, I know how this goes. Like I said, personally, this one is hard for me as well, but you know how it goes. You tell yourself you'll start writing once you understand story structure a little bit better. And then it's character arcs, then it's theme, then its point of view or world building or whatever else it is that you feel like you need to learn more about. And the finish line keeps moving because there's always going to be something else you could learn. But eventually you have to realize that more general advice about writing stops answering the questions that are keeping you stuck. What I mean by this is that a craft book can explain what a strong central conflict does. It can explain what the central conflict's purpose is in a story, but it can't decide what the central conflict of your story should be, right? A podcast can teach you why your protagonist needs a clear goal and what the function of that is in your story, but it can't choose your specific character's goal for you. Those kind of answers only start emerging when you start making decisions about your own story. Again, what your protagonist wants, why they want it, what the central conflict is, and how one event leads to the next. Now, again, a caveat here, that does not mean that you need to stop learning or blindly start drafting. It just means letting what you learn lead you back to your story. So instead of asking, what else do I need to learn about writing or what else could I learn? Because we know there are so many things that you could learn and read up on, right? There are so many things. Instead of that, I want you to start asking, how can I apply what I'm learning to the novel that I'm actually writing? And the truth here is that you're never going to feel as ready as you think you should. That's because no amount of preparation or reading or learning can remove the uncertainty that's always going to be there before you start writing. It's just never going to happen as much as I wish it could. So at some point, your progress is going to depend less on finding another answer and more on making decisions for your own story, all while knowing you can refine things later. So you're not locked into the decisions you make, but you do need to start making those decisions. All right, so the key takeaway here is that learning, of course, helps when it gives you a new question or a new tool that you can apply to your novel. But more information alone is not going to make you feel ready to start writing, start outlining, or to ultimately finish your draft. So just remember that progress comes from using what you already know to make real decisions about your story.

Myth Three Prose Makes The Story

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Now, next up is myth number three, and this is the myth that beautiful writing makes a good story. Now, when most people picture a successful writer, they picture someone who just produces gorgeous sentences, vivid descriptions, clever metaphors, and paragraphs that just flow out of them effortlessly. And because prose like that is what we see on the page, it's easy to assume that beautiful writing is what makes a story resonate with readers and it's what makes a novel good. But the problem with this belief, aside from the fact that it's not true, is that this belief sends writers straight to the sentence level. So when a chapter feels flat or when they start losing momentum, they end up polishing the same pages again and again, hoping that if they polish their prose and maybe just change a few words and sharpen how they're saying something, they hope that that will make the story work too, or that it will make their draft look like the novels they read. Now I totally get why this is tempting, right? Because sentence-level revision can feel really productive because the improvement is right there immediately on the page in front of us. Compare that to something like figuring out why the story stalled in the first place, whether that's because your character lacks a clear goal or the conflict in your story isn't escalating, or one of the other various reasons it could be, right? That is less obvious and often harder work and more uncomfortable work to do. So again, this is why writers default to polishing chapters and scenes that already exist, while the rest of the novel remains unclear and unwritten. Now, real quick, I want you to just think about a book that you love and that you just couldn't put down. I'm guessing that you kept turning the pages because you wanted to know whether the character would get what they wanted, you wanted to know what it would cost them, and what they were going to do when things inevitably got worse. And that pull or that desire to keep turning the pages, that comes from the story that's well crafted underneath the sentences. So again, a character to care about, who has a meaningful goal, who's facing obstacles and conflict, and has something real at stake, and probably ultimately changes by the end, right? That's what pulls you in. Now, beautiful prose can absolutely strengthen that experience, but beautiful prose cannot create that experience on its own. If there's no story underneath the sentences, if your reader doesn't understand what the character wants or why these moments that you're showing matter, then polishing the language isn't going to do anything for you. That's why I say a lot in this podcast that your main job in a first draft is not to make every sentence beautiful. It's to get the story down and move the story forward all the way to the end. And yes, your prose will need attention eventually, but polishing works best and is more efficient, more constructive once you have a complete story that works and is ready to polish. Alright, so the key takeaway here is that beautiful prose can certainly make a strong story more vivid and enjoyable, but beautiful prose alone cannot make up for a lack of story underneath the sentences. And remember that during a first draft, focusing on moving the story forward and getting to the end needs to come before perfecting the pages you've already written. I know it's going to be hard, but trust me on that and just get to the end before you start polishing.

Myth Four Perfect On First Pass

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Alright, now next up is myth number four. And myth number four is something like I should be able to get the story right as I write it. I should be able to write it perfectly in one pass. Something like that, right? And this one is not about expecting every sentence to sound beautiful like we just talked about. This myth is about expecting the entire story to come together while you're writing it for the first time. So imagine you sit down to write a scene and you're expecting yourself to figure out what should be in the scene, how it's going to advance the plot, how it's going to reveal the character's inner struggle, how you're going to build the story world, how you're going to plant a clue that matters later, how you might reinforce the theme, maintain the right pace, and have it all read beautifully, all on the first attempt, all at the same time. Of course that feels overwhelming, right? In this scenario, you'd be asking yourself to solve several different kinds of story problems at once, often while you're still discovering what needs to happen in the first place. And because all of those elements are connected, one uncertain choice can make the whole scene just feel impossible, overwhelming, maybe like it needs to be separated into four different scenes, right? I've seen it all. But I want you to think about it like this. If you don't fully understand the character you're writing yet, then how can you know exactly what they would do? If you don't know where your story's headed, then how do you know which clues to plant? If you haven't crystallized your theme, then how are you going to make sure that shows up on the page all in one pass? Right. And this is why writers get overwhelmed because page by page it feels like you need to kind of understand, maybe also reinvent the entire story before you can even write another sentence. And to some extent, that is true. You do need to understand the foundation of your story. So what is your story actually about? Who's your character? What do they want and why? What conflict gets in their way and things like that. But that does not mean you have to have every detail figured out, or that you have to produce a perfect draft on your first try. Now let's back up a second and talk about why we tend to expect this of ourselves. And this expectation comes partly from reading published novels. Because when we're in the reader's seat, when we're reading a book, things like the plot, the character arc, the theme, the pacing, and the prose, they are all working on the page together at the same time from our experience as a reader, right? So as a reader, we see the finished result. We do not see the separate rounds of discovering what the story's about, creating an outline if that's in the writer's process, drafting the novel start to finish, and then revising it probably multiple times, right? We don't see any of that that goes into the finished product. So I think that's where this expectation comes from. And then we sit down and we expect our first draft to look like that. But what I've learned after more than a decade of working with writers one-on-one and in my notes to novel course is that writers rarely solve every part of a novel equally well in one pass. And what I mean by this is that you might draft complete scenes that get the plot and the external consequences on the page, even if the dialogue is rough and the scenes are lacking interiority. Or you might be someone who sketches your scenes almost like a screenplay, so they're mostly filled with dialogue, entrances, exits, and basic stage direction, and then return later to add narration, description, and emotional depth. Everyone's process will look different, and no matter how you tackle it, it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. It just means you're building your story in layers, which is exactly what you should be doing. And then once your full draft exists and you've gotten to the end and now you understand your story better, then you can return to those thinner layers in each scene and make all the pieces work together a little bit more deliberately. Alright, so the key takeaway here is that you do not have to make every part of your novel work at once and especially not in your first draft. Instead, I would rather you focus on the most important job of the current path you're working on, knowing that you can always deepen, connect, and refine the other layers once more of the story exists.

Myth Five Stuck Means You Failed

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All right, now last up is myth number five, and this one is getting stuck means something is wrong with me or my idea. I see this one a lot when a manuscript stops working or when a writer gets stuck. They often treat it as a judgment on themselves. So they think things like, maybe I just chose the wrong idea, or maybe my idea is stupid, maybe I'm not creative enough, or I just don't have that natural-born talent. Or maybe the thought sounds like real writers sit down and probably already know what happens next. There must be something wrong with me because I don't. It usually starts there, and then after a few false starts, or maybe a few drafts that you've gotten stuck on, the inner voice starts to feel a little bit more personal. So it starts to sound like, okay, well, maybe I'm just someone who loves books and I'll dream about writing for the rest of my life, but I'm just not the kind of person that can actually finish one, right? So it starts to get a little bit more personal and sometimes a little bit more nasty, which is unfortunate. And one thing I want to point out right away about this kind of interpretation is that it makes getting stuck in a draft feel like you're at the end of the road. Like if your idea is quote unquote bad, then maybe you should just abandon the whole thing altogether. Or if real writers don't struggle this way, then every difficult season or encounter that you have becomes more evidence that you're collecting that you just aren't a real writer, right? We all know how this feels. But I want you to know that getting stuck doesn't automatically mean that your idea is broken or that it's bad or that you lack what it takes. Because more often than not, it just means that you've reached a part of your story that your current understanding or your current process hasn't prepared you to write yet. So in other words, it's most likely a process problem. What I mean by that is that maybe you started drafting before you understood what your story is really about. So maybe you haven't built a strong foundation for your story to stand on yet. Maybe your protagonist lacks a clear goal, or maybe you have exciting scenes in mind, but you're not really sure how they link together or what they're all adding up to. Or maybe you've written some pages and you're just kind of polishing them because you don't know where the story's headed next or what you should really do to get back in the swing of things, right? And all of these are problems that you can investigate and solve. They are not character flaws. So what I want you to do is look at the specific places where you feel stuck, where you feel uncertain, or where you feel unsure, and just figure out like where are you in the story, what's going on, why do you feel uncertain or unsure? And I want you to look at this because where you're stuck can give you insight into exactly what's wrong and how to fix it. I just did an episode on this topic. It's episode number 257, and it's called Stuck in Chapter One or the Messy Middle. Here's what your stuck point reveals. I will link to that in the show notes. But the gist of it is that if every draft you write tends to lose momentum in the same place, let's say around 20,000 words, then I want you to zoom out and say, okay, what do I really feel unsure or unclear about here? If you're someone who repeatedly returns to chapter one to polish things over and over, check in with yourself and just say, am I doing this because I'm really unsure or uncertain about where the rest of the story is headed? Right. So just kind of check in and say, where am I feeling uncertain or unsure? And then what information can I glean from that stuck point? Because this is really going to give you a nice clue about where the story or where your process needs more support. All right. So the key point here is that getting stuck does not mean that you necessarily need to work harder, abandon your idea, or scrap the whole thing and start over. I want you to treat your stuckness as a clue and follow that clue to figure out what's going wrong. Again, I'm going to link to an episode where I talk about the three most common places people get stuck. If you feel like this is the myth that's really holding you back, then definitely go listen to that episode. And then what I want you to do is solve that problem before you make your stuckness mean that you're bad or your idea is bad or that you're just not cut out to be a writer because that just isn't true.

Turning Stuck Points Into A Process

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All right, so those are the five beliefs that I see holding writers back from finishing their drafts all the time. And I want you to notice that all five of these myths pull your attention away from the work your story actually needs. They tell you to add more time, make more effort, find more information, or polish things that don't need polishing instead of identifying the specific decision, page, or problem that's keeping your draft from moving forward. And again, this is why you can care so deeply about your novel, work on it for years, and still feel as though you're getting nowhere. I see it happen all the time. You're probably just trying to solve the wrong problem or trying to solve too many parts of your novel at once. And I want you to remember that finishing a draft becomes much more manageable and enjoyable when you have a process that helps you identify and execute the most useful job in front of you. Sometimes that job is going to be deciding what your protagonist wants, why they want it, what the conflict will be like in your story. Other times it's figuring out what's going to happen in the very next scene, and sometimes it's just writing an imperfect scene so you can keep moving and refine it later. Again, the goal isn't to know every single thing before you start or to get every page in front of you right the first time. It's just to have enough clarity to take the next meaningful step and to know what to look at when you get stuck. And once you start approaching your story this way, finishing stops feeling like a mysterious ability that other writers possess and you don't. Instead, it becomes a series of story decisions that you can make and problems that you can solve one

Notes To Novel Invitation

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at a time. And if you want my help with this, if you want to get your hands on my step-by-step process that I use with other writers to develop their ideas, map out their story, and write their first draft all the way to the end, then that's exactly what I teach Inside Notes to Novel. Enrollments opening again very soon. I'm going to drop the link to the wait list in the show notes. So if you want to be the first to know when doors open, and if you want to get your hands on a clear step-by-step process to help you go from idea to finish draft, go click the link in the show notes. All right, so that's it for today's episode. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. I hope your writing is going well, and I will talk to you next week.