Strategy Loading…Episode 2 - James Worth, Independent Author

Humor, heart, and sharing words that matter.

Listen to the full Conversation:

Transcript:

Meghan:

Strategy Loading... started as a series in career exploration, but I found that it's not the career that I'm interested in, it's the passion. So I hope to share and explore the passions of the people around me who have followed their creativity and interests, to do something out of the ordinary and carve their own paths in a way that inspire me, and I hope will inspire you too.

I've had the privilege of being friends with James now for a decade and witnessing his journey in writing and sharing his writing in the past two years has only brought him closer to himself. It's something that I love to see and something that I want to share with anyone and everyone who is willing to listen.

In this episode, we talk about what it means to write fiction that feels true. How sharing your work can bring you closer to yourself and why imagining another world through art, through writing through music is a practice we could all use more of.

James refers to his writing as a combination of humor and heart. I think that's the most representative phrase to describe James. Not only in his writing, but in his relationships and in the way that he carries himself through the world. Through his writing, he explores the complexities of interpersonal relationships, taking big feelings and transforming them into something that everyone can see themselves in.

So I encourage you to let James' work introduce you to creativity and imagining another reality.

James is thoughtful, funny, and generous with his perspective, and I'm so excited for you to hear this conversation.

James:
I would say I've been writing my entire life, but I haven't started sharing my writing with other people until the last year or so which makes me feel more like a writer, to actually be giving it to others.

Meghan:
And sometimes a writer needs a reader.

James:
A writer does need a reader. Not every—not everything you write has to be read. But there are some things that should be shared, if they can offer something to someone else.

Meghan:
Can you go further into that, how do you determine what is worth being shared?

James:
I know it has purpose when it feels like it's holding something for me. And I like to think of the big, thematic things I write as vessels for feelings or ideas or stuff that's happened in my life that I don't quite understand.

Writing helps me take it out of me, and put it in front of me so I can observe it and look at it and not just be holding it all inside myself. And I think anytime I do that successfully and I feel like I've figured something out through writing about something and putting it outside of me, that is how I know it's something that should be shared, because if it's done something for me, it can probably do something for someone else. And you really just don't know until you share it if it can.

Meghan:
We're all so much more alike than we are different.

James:
That's true.

Meghan:
So people are just looking for something that they see in themselves, in someone else or what someone else shares.

James:
When people say, take the specific and make it universal. I think that's a little bit misleading in terms of writing advice because I think no matter how specific you make something you're writing, someone is gonna find some way they relate to it, even if this specific thing hasn't happened to them.

You can't help relating when reading or watching something. It triggers memories for you. You think about an experience you had that was similar and even if the story itself has zero relation to you, you can follow the journey. And if it's something that you've been looking for an answer to in your own life, then you'll take that away.

I think my first ever literary influence, the first time I ever read an author and was like, I see a voice and a style and something that only this person can do is Rick Riordan who wrote the Percy Jackson series. That was my favorite young adult series when I was younger.

There was this way he was able to balance humor and heart that I think that even though I'm not reading books for children the way I used to, that has always followed me. It's a balance I try to achieve in my own writing. I want when someone reads something that I've wrote, I want them to find a place where they can laugh and be entertained, and another place where they feel moved very deeply. Those are the two ends of the spectrum of emotion for me. That's what I want from art and so it's what I want to put into my own work.

When I write, there is something musical in it, but that’s just language. There are natural rhythms to writing, but achieving that rhythm, especially in fiction, can be really difficult. It's something that writers are working their whole life to achieve, is to find a rhythm to their own voice and not just a rhythm that they are copying. You have to have your own kind of cadence and that's what makes some of the best authors is that most people don't even necessarily pick up on that, but there is a rhythm to the way that they write, that you can feel when you're reading them.

This will be a surprise to no one who knows me. My all time favorite artist is Sufjan Stevens. Anyone who's listened to him will understand that he's a storyteller. Across his whole catalog, he's someone I respected for a long time because he doesn't pigeonhole himself and he doesn't allow other people to pigeonhole him.

The kinds of stories he tells and the mode in which he tells them, he doesn't put limits on himself, and that's something I try to avoid in my own writing. Because he has these giant concept albums about states where he tells stories about the people who live in that in one specific state. And then he has more folk-leaning music that tell more personal stories about him and his life that have enough details that they could be fictional or they could be real, or they could be somewhere in between and he has like weirder, more electronic ambient music where maybe there aren't even any words, but you can feel something while listening to it and you feel that rhythm and flow that you're being taken from point A to point B. If there is a story being told, it's a lot more open interpretation but I would say he is, he's for sure the biggest influence on me in all facets of the art that I make. Mainly because he doesn't limit himself and I don't do that to myself either if I can help it.

So I feel like when I, when I listen to music—and I listen to music while I'm writing, pretty much always—I am trying to convey a rhythm or a flow. And my favorite musicians and art makers in general are all focused on telling a story. I feel really drawn to folk style music 'cause at its root it's just storytelling with rhythm to it. And similarly, there's a rhythm to telling a good story, a kind of ebb and flow of all the elements and themes and characters. and so that's something that's really at the forefront for me when I'm writing is how is this building and moving and keeping a reader within the world a bit and not getting distracted. I'm trying to make something that feels natural and real, which I think musicians are doing too.

The only real writing routine I have is that I do morning pages every day, which is just 30 minutes in the morning right when I wake up and it's just freeform journaling.

I would have a lot harder of a time like writing throughout the rest of the day, I think I would feel less moved to write if I hadn't done it in the morning. It just gets the mind going for the day. Whatever comes to my mind. Sometimes if I don't have anything that I feel like writing about or talking about, I'll give myself like a fiction prompt and just stream of consciousness something. And that's the one thing that is like my dedicated writing time every day. But beyond that, I wouldn't really say I have a consistent practice.

It's just, if I have the time and the energy to, I will sit down and do it. That doesn't really look any specific way. It's just what I can write in any setting and if I can, I will. But there are some times that I just can't, even though there's something I want to write about, it just doesn't come to me and I found that there's not really anything I can do to force it. I can't be like I want to write, so I will light my incense and sit at my desk and just sit there until it comes to me. If it's not coming, it's not coming. But I still find I write consistently and often without having specific times set aside for myself.

But it is something I'd like to continue to develop.

The year that I wrote my book, Mars in Retrograde, right before it, I had written another book. They both came out in three months, out of my head, and both of them, this was before I started using Substack. I didn't really know what to do with them. I'd written a couple of books before in my life, but I knew that they just weren't complete and they weren't the vision that I had. But both of these had something to them that I wanted to see where they would go.

So I tried to go down the traditional publishing routes of querying the books and sending them out to literary agents and seeing what would come back. And neither of them went anywhere. Got a lot of rejections, which is normal. Still defeating. But, it was frustrating and it made me like the work less, not the writing itself. It just made me really apathetic towards the idea of publishing. I just didn't see how I would ever find satisfaction in doing it through these traditional routes of this really disembodied and disconnected sense of like hitting a bunch of bullet points and needing to have the right words to sell your novel, even if they aren't necessarily true. And it was really disheartening.

I wrote both these books in 2023 and I just stuck them in a drawer 'cause they weren't going anywhere. And sometime after that is when I started writing on Substack and I was sharing my writing publicly and there's a lot of people on there who serialize novels and they will either write a book as they're publishing it and they'll share like a chapter a week and they just will write and publish as they go. And others like myself who had a full body of work and decided to send it out week by week just to see what kind of audience they could draw in.

And when I started there, I told myself, and I think I even said publicly, I was like, I don't see myself ever publishing a novel on here. It doesn't feel like—I told myself it wasn't the right space for it and I didn't see how it could do well there, or how it would fit into this space. Something about my writing to me, and I'm sure a lot of other writers feel like this, is it felt like it belonged in a book like I wanted to keep it analog.

But then as time went on and I found a lot more satisfaction in sharing writing online, I found it wasn't as disconnected and isolating as I'd made it out to be. There were a lot of people who were really willing to genuinely engage with your writing and not just read it or skim it.

A screen isn't a bad thing. I had to work that idea out of me that there was something evil about things that happen on your phone or your laptop and once I got over that I was like, I don't want to go down the traditional publishing route right now. I don't see it going anywhere for me. So I was like, I've gotten a good reader base from sharing short stories and some nonfiction pieces. So I'm just gonna do it and I decided last summer that I was going to do that and I ended up writing another book, for that purpose.

Meghan:
That was three.

James:
That was three. And I wrote this other book in two months and I was like talking it up while I was writing it, and I was like, this is the one I'm, this is the one I'm gonna share. And I was like, dropping hints about what it was gonna be about and the genre and the kind of setting a vibe for it.

Once I finished it, it's not bad, but it needed a lot more work. And this one, for sure, to me, said that it wasn't ready to be put out in this format. And it wouldn't work in a weekly serialization format. So that was when I pulled Mars in Retrograde out of the drawer. I had been sitting untouched for a whole year.

Reading it back again, I saw that what I'd been talking about, the kind of balance of humor and heart, which I hadn't put into this other novel I’d just written. And it felt, even a whole year later, like it was truer to me than the thing I'd just written. And it also aligned more with what I'd been publishing on Substack.

It felt like it's something that people would want and expect from me. So I decided I was gonna publish it and I went over it really thoroughly, editing it for a few weeks and then I just went ahead and I started throwing it online, and I was doing it weekly, but I shared that you could just buy the whole thing as like a PDF download, if you wanted it all at once, which a few people did, which also made me feel better that it didn't have to be weekly thing, if that wasn't people's vibe.

That rolled out for a while, and then earlier this year I went through the process of figuring out how to make a physical version of the book and finally got something physical and real. Like a year and a half after I actually wrote this book, I got to make a physical paperback to give to people and for people to buy and for people to read.

Which is really cool. It's felt really nice.

Meghan:
I'm proud. I'm proud to witness this.

James:
Thanks. Yeah. I'm proud of myself too, which is a weird feeling.

Meghan:
I know. It's it's a foundation for more pride.

James:
It is. It really is. And it grows.

Meghan:
That was beautiful though.

James:
Thank you.

Meghan:
Let's go into Substack. What drew you to Substack first? And like, how did you find out about it?

James:
Two very weird sources there. The first time I ever heard of Substack, there is this comedian, Charlie Bardey, who I love. He's very funny. And he was the first person I ever saw using Substack. I think it was during the pandemic where everyone was looking for different ways to share their stuff with people. And like obviously for comedians, they couldn't get up in clubs and do stand up.

So he started sharing in his newsletter there, and I remember looking at it, and back then Substack was way different than it is now, and I didn't really understand what was going on there and what the platform was about and what you could do there. So I followed him for a bit and I didn't really see what could come out of a platform like that.

And then in, in 2023 someone I had dated started a Substack where they were sharing climate news and that they were doing that regularly. And that was something I went and I subscribed to his newsletter 'cause I was actually interested in what he was putting out.

And so that, that was my first, like the first blip on my radar that normal people were using this and were finding meaning and ways to use it that I hadn't really known were possible. And I don't remember what the moment was or what the thing was that made me go on and be like, I'm doing this now.

But I had decided at the beginning of 2024 that I wanted to publish something and I looked really hard into self-publishing and I was realizing how expensive it was and was like I need a way to have an audience, like people that are rooting for me and want to see what I can do and what kind of like art I can put out.

And if I have a base where I could ask for financial support, which is not really how I wanted to go into it, but it's what I was looking for. It is really expensive. From the research I was doing is really expensive to self-publish because so much of what you have to do to self-publish is very gate kept.

And the way they pitch it to you is like you have to outsource a lot of stuff, which is something I found ways around on Substack through the generosity of other writers. But that was what brought me to starting a Substack.

I've been in a lot of online communities in my life. And none of them have felt quite like what I've developed on Substack. And it's interesting because it wasn't really a preexisting thing. I've been a small part of what has come out of it and I jumped on Substack right around the time they introduced their social media timeline feature, Notes.

Where before then it was like everyone had their separate newsletters and it was like you could message other people, but it was hard to figure out who your people were. You could just read other people and admire their writing. And I know a lot of people have been writing on Substack for years now, and they were already talking to people and forming their groups around then.

But when I jumped on and when they introduced this social media aspect, it became a lot easier to find other writers and to engage with them on a more personal level. I think because it is social media and a lot of people are reluctant to call it that or to let it be social media, but it is, it's primarily what I do on there is talk to other writers about the process of writing. And I think in that regard, because writing is so personal to me, I've been the most vulnerable I've ever been in an online space on Substack and a lot of other people are doing the same thing.

It's very vulnerable to talk about your process and why you write and to share these pieces of yourself that are coming straight from your heart. It took me a long time to really feel like, I don't know, connected to a lot of them. For a while we were just following each other and cheering on each other's writing.

But in the past, like five or six months I've been doing a lot of collaborating with other people. I've opened up my process to others and have let other people let me in on their process. And in that way, a lot of these connections have gone deeper.

While doing all of that, I was trying to figure out self-publishing and how to get a physical copy of my book and I had this space where I could just go out there and be like how do I do this? I say that I published this whole book myself. I wrote it myself and edited it myself. I designed like the type and the formatting of the book and the cover and everything. And I did that all myself.

But I had to ask for help. I had to have other people to give me a direction. And because Substack is so open format, like anything goes there, like you can be sharing your visual art, we have actual editors there, like people who are professional book editors who will, for free, show them editing someone's work so that you can see what they are doing.

And that is a tool that they're willingly giving up. Otherwise they could just be charging people to, to have their work edited without any of the kind of like process of what they're doing. But in seeing other people's work get openly edited, I have gotten the tools to be able to help myself edit.

And there are people on there who share how they like design book covers and others who go over how they format books and the best ways to promote your book once you've self-published.

There are all of these disparate parts of the publishing industry that were kept secret on purpose so that, like the Big Five publishers could keep control over all of that and make sure that what was getting published was mainly through their routes.

But having these communities where everyone has a different piece of that and you can just ask what you're supposed to do, I would not have been able to do any of this. I wouldn't have even thought to self-publish on my own if I hadn't had this community of people to ask.

Meghan:
Substack University.

James:
Yeah. Way better than Tumblr University. When they do Substack Prom, I'm going for Prom King.

One of the coolest things has been seeing other writers that I admire get excited about my writing. I had two writers on Substack who they had their own kind of book club, Tom Schecter and E.K McPherson they invited me to do a livestream interview to talk about the book because they just enjoyed it that much and they wanted to know more about the process of writing it and what my inspirations were and how it all came around, and that was really cool. That was something I didn't know my writing could do. I didn't know it would impact people like that.

And I had another writer on Substack the infamous Clancy Steadwell who wrote a really wonderful review of the book through a series he does where he reviews mostly short stories, but he did a couple of book reviews and stuff like that where—that's another part of the publishing industry that is a mess, is there aren't a ton of people getting paid to do book reviews. And people on Substack are really open about reviewing other people's work and like offering critiques. It's fun. Like we all want each other to be better writers and we wanna see each other improve.

Collaboratively I wrote a novella type thing with another writer AP Murphy who is a wonderful, crazy man. One of the most interesting people I've ever known and I really enjoy working with him. We've been writing a ton together since, and writing with another person is something I never saw myself doing, but it's been a lot of fun and it's opened me up to pushing my own process a bit more and letting it be a little bit more fluid and seeing how another person works and what works for one person, what works for another and how you can mesh those together.

I've also explored making visual art on Substack a lot and have been able to offer to make art for other people for their Substack pieces which has been a lot of fun. And I've been taking like commissions for making collages.

More recently I, me and my good friend and creative partner Pablo have started a little like Digital Zine centered around his film photography, which is really stunning. And it's been really experimental and we're just having fun with it, but kind of meshing the worlds of visual and literary art and seeing what we can make of it and push the boundaries and all that.

So yeah, I've had a ton of opportunities on there and I'm continuously pushing what my art is and what it can look like and how it can be received. And it's just, it's constant learning and growing, which is all I want from life ever.

When I first started publishing, I think I let the idea of the audience affect what I was posting a lot more than I was conscious of. It always feels like you're in control of your own process and what you're doing, but I don't know. Substack is a big nonfiction machine. People love nonfiction. They love cultural commentary, essays, they like when you write about like pop stars and what dating is like and in really little ways I let that kind of influence what I was writing about—and I never wrote anything that I hated or felt bad about, but there was always like a little seed of doubt telling me that I wasn't doing exactly what I wanted to, which I think I needed. I think doing things that you're not entirely sure of or not entirely proud of is just a way of directing yourself towards the stuff that matters.

After five or six months on Substack, when I was gaining a reader base pretty slowly, I felt like I was not selling myself out, but I was not doing justice to my own writing. And it was reflected in the fact that I didn't have a ton of people around yet or reading it. And I think after that, like six month trial period, I just—once I decided I was gonna self-publish a novel I was like, all of that is just gonna go out the window. I don't care about other people's expectations. I don't care what people want from me, I want people to enjoy what I write, but I have to enjoy it. For them to enjoy it. It just doesn't work if I'm not putting out work that I can be proud of.

So like publishing and serializing the novel and seeing that it was received really well and better than anything else I'd published, it just showed me I should always trust my instincts.

And especially that fiction does have a place, even if it's not super algorithmically supported or it isn't the kind of stuff that is going to go viral or get tons of likes. You'll find really profound moments of connection if you're writing things that feel profound to you.

So yeah, once, once I started publishing the book I knew I had something that was working for me and I really leaned into fiction since then, which is the thing I always wanted to write. That was what I wrote when I was younger. It's what I wrote until I started publishing online and wondered what else I could do. And I still like writing some nonfiction things.

But it's the same deal. Like it has to feel good to me. I can't be influenced by trends or what people are talking about and what I think an audience will want to read. It has to sound like me. It has to be something that only I could ever think up. And it has to move me. If it moves me, then I want to share it.

And I think since then I, I've developed this relationship with the audience, where putting something out, it isn't about them, but it is for them. Like I write for me and I publish it because I think that other people could take something from it. And as long as I'm doing it like that where me and my own beliefs and my emotions are at the center, then I can feel good about what I'm putting out.

Often when I'm doing that, it’s the stuff that connects the most. So I, I think disregarding the fact that you are putting it out to an audience of a large amount of people is really the most helpful thing you can do. And then once it's out, that's the fun part is when I get to see how people react to it and like what parts of a piece of fiction someone is drawn to.

And, people will like, comment and share their thoughts and say what was relatable to them. That's fun. That's the cool part is that I didn't have an audience in mind writing it, but once it's out, it's not mine anymore. People can do whatever they want with it, which is scary, but it ends up being really fulfilling in the end.

There's always self-doubt. I don't think that's something I'll ever escape. I think I get better at managing it, but especially when writing a novel, there is just inevitably always a point that I hit where I doubt the entire work. I doubt why I'm writing it. I doubt my intentions. I doubt that it will ever be good, that it could be received by anyone, that anyone else would enjoy it.

It’s really overwhelming and it is like a physical block that I have to push past. And I would say it gets easier. I don't know if that's entirely true. I think maybe I'm just better at it than I was before. But the only solution I have found is to keep writing anyways. To share the thing I wrote anyways and have its reception and the things people say about it reinforce that I am doing what I'm supposed to, even if the doubt feels really real.

And there are things I published where I wasn't entirely sure of it. And then it, it did pretty well and I still like, I have a hard time going back to it 'cause it's just like really infused with that sense of doubt and that it's hard to look at. But it's still worth it. I think.

Self-promotion is difficult. I think when I started doing Substack, it was really. Like it, it felt like one of the most embarrassing things that I've ever done to be like, Hey, everybody, I am posting fiction online for free, can you please subscribe and let me like put stuff in your email like that.

It felt like really gross and shameful. And again, that was another thing I really had to push past to get to the point that I can like regularly post things and not feel like I'm inconveniencing people somehow. And it's gotten easier as I find ways to make self-promotion fun for me. I think doing it with humor and doing it with, I think, a little bit of cheekiness. When I feel like I'm being satirical about my own self-promotion, it gives you that out of being like: Please read me. Please read me. Please read me, here I am again like the Bernie Sanders meme.

I'm once again asking you to read my new short story. It gives you a way to, to step around the shame and be like, it is embarrassing to want and need other people to observe and interact with your art. It's not a bad thing that it's a little strange, people do need encouragement. Like a lot of people aren't going to go out of their way to find new and exciting and engaging art. They want you to give them a reason. And I think being able to put myself and my own humor and my own creative drive behind that, it makes self-promotion a lot more fun. And it gives people like a reason, like you have to be likable, unfortunately. And fortunately I like myself, so I feel it's easier to get other people to like me.

I feel better about self-promoting now. It's a lot less embarrassing than it used to be. And because I'm not very on social media the way I used to be, I'm mostly just promoting to other writers at this point, and like other people on Substack and everyone is there to read and to engage with writing. So it feels a lot more purposeful there. And like the things I'm saying will actually have an impact and get people excited and wanting to read.

And advice for people just starting out or people who want to be publishing their writing or their art or like anything. I think the most important thing I did and that others did for me is reading and commenting.

Reading other people is the best thing you can do for your own writing. Through reading the work of other Substackers, I've been able to parse apart what I like in a story. And so I know what to put into my own stories and also what I don't like about stories that I might enjoy in another person's writing, but I can think to myself like, that's just not the kind of story I want to tell.

Those things are really helpful, and when you engage with another person's work in good faith and you're being kind and open and wanting to show that you have welcomed their work to yourself and it has done something for you, you have to do it without the idea of I need this to be reciprocated, you need to be reading for the sake of reading. And people can tell when you're just reading and liking and commenting 'cause you want them to read your work and that is really embarrassing. And we can tell, but when you're reading for the sake of supporting another writer, they are more willing and more likely to interact with your stuff too.

And I, I think that is how my community of writers has expanded so quickly is I read widely and I read consistently. And I read outside of genres I would normally do, like I don't write a ton of horror, but there's a really big horror fiction community on Substack and reading that kind of work shows me a lot about like my own storytelling instincts and how to push it.

And that's my biggest advice is read generously and be kind and open to other people. Connecting with other writers and talking about the process and figuring out what works for you. It's all part of the same thing.

Meghan:
That's beautiful.

James
Thank you.

Meghan:
That was great advice.

James:
Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me here on Strategy Loading… Episode Two. I've been James Worth self-published, independent author. You can find me on substack.com. James Worth. You can find my book at james-worth.com. Mars in Retrograde debut novel eat it Up.

Meghan:
Eat it up.

James:
Eat it up.

Thanks for having me. This was so much fun.

Meghan:
It's been so much fun. I love talking to James.

James:
Welcome to my sick twisted mind. I'm just kidding.

Meghan:
I hope you enjoyed hearing about James' writing Journey, the way he's turned big feelings into stories, and stories into connection.

Writing fiction is a practice of imagining a non-existent world, and imagining another world to the one that we currently live in is exactly what we all should be doing.

If you’re sitting on something you love whether it's a story, a project, or a creative path, I’d love to help you shape it into something meaningful.

---