253: Channeling Main Character Energy into Writing a Debut Novel with Jamie Varon

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Everyone's path is gonna be what it is. And for me to expect that my path should be like this person that I'm envious of, that's a recipe for me feeling very miserable and not really doing my best work. At the end of the day.

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Welcome back free timers. You are in for a treat today because I have my first friend from the Twitterverse. Well, now it's the exoverse. Jamie Varen. We met online in 2007, 2008, and we met IRL for the first time over a cupcake. It was specifically our very first cupcake tweet up. We went on to host many of those and she's just moving and shaking. So we caught up recently on episode 278 of the Pivot podcast for one of her previous books. Radically content and now there's also a journal that goes with it. Today we're here talking about her debut novel, Main Character Energy, which was such a joyful read. She got a book deal with Park Rowe of HarperCollins and the book came out in September 2023. I just love the idea of embracing each of our own main character energy as we turn the corner into the new year. So Jamie, welcome to the show.

Aw, thanks for having me. I love talking to you. And yep, thanks. I feel like our cupcake tweet ups were like ahead of their time because we actually were doing the weird thing of bringing people offline and that did not start for a very long time. So people used to be like, you met someone off Twitter? I'm like, yeah, they're amazing.

What are you talking about? Were they an ax murderer? How did you know it's safe?

That was the time of that of, like, yeah, how did you trust it would be, like, the person they said they were? And I'm like, I don't know. It never occurred to me that that wouldn't be who you are or who any of those people were that we met up with.

Well, I've had a lot of fun following your journey from near and far and just seeing you build your own business and go your own way. And then, of course, Radically Content is such an exquisite book. You and I were both writing during 2021 and kind of tapped into some universal energy of that time and now main character energy. I just have so many questions today to go behind the book. And, like, just the idea of writing fiction seems very intimidating to me. So I'm really excited to dig into it. I don't normally do this, but I figured it would be better for you to read than me. I'm wondering if we can have a little story time to start. If you could just read from page 112, which is where the book really gets its title. This is almost like the moment, the aha moment. If you could read us a little excerpt.

Of course.

Women like me don't get to be the main character. And I've internalized that belief my entire life. In the past, I've let this belief drown me. I've bought into it, felt shame because of it, and let it dictate the edges of what felt possible for me. But Margo was one of the few people who saw more for herself and more for me. Don't I owe it to myself to try, to not give up, to keep reaching? Don't I owe it to Margot? Maybe confidence doesn't come from being the best or thinnest or prettiest or most perfect, but just from showing up for yourself over and over. At least that's what Margot believed. And she had the kind of bold and adventurous life I want for myself. As I sit here surrounded by not just Margot's things, but her presence, I realize that I'm out of experience. I don't want to escape anymore or hide or cower.

So beautiful. Thank you.

And for context, Margot is Poppy's, the main character's aunt. So she's her guiding light from the beyond. Yes.

I love how you weave this theme of confidence throughout the book and something that you say through Poppy's character. Because, of course, Poppy's also trying to get a book deal in the novel. She's resolute in that she doesn't want it to be a romance novel. Was that true for you, Jamie, the author as well?

Not really. I don't have the same, like, Poppy's reticence for not wanting to write romance is because she wants to write thrillers, but her older brother is this popular romance novelist, and she doesn't want to follow in his footsteps. And I think she also just, like, kind of wants to do her own thing. But the romance verse, thriller, it's a metaphor for. Is she going to actually listen to herself and her intuition, or is she just going to go with, like, what she thinks is going to sell? Or because her brother is this romance novelist, will she get a book deal easier? And it's that constant conundrum, I feel like, with creatives, where it's like, am I going to do what's popular or am I going to do what's true to myself? And I kept trying to put in these kind of subtle inner conflicts with her to show that she was constantly drifting from her connection to herself and thinking that the reason things weren't going her way was because she just wasn't good enough. But it was really that she wasn't actually listening and trusting herself.

How did you come up with that as a through line?

It's hard to say even now, because with novels, the way things get edited, it's like, I wonder if I even have my first draft anymore. The way that it just has changed so much. I probably have it as a file somewhere. I remember that my first draft was. She was absolutely, like, riddled with anxiety, every page almost. And when I read it with fresher eyes after I wrote the first draft, I was like, okay, well, this is a little much. We need her to at least have moments where she's not feeling that or at least battling against it. Because I had personally suffered from a lot of anxiety and sometimes still do. And it wasn't like, I'm poppy. I mean, there might be some similarities, but I'm really not her. I use that experience of having anxiety and putting it into her because I just hadn't seen a whole lot of characters that questioned themselves and were overthinking and doubting themselves. Because I often would read things where people were just, like, accepting and receiving the good things in their lives. I was like, whoa. People just accept that, yeah, I can do this, and I'm gonna go forward. And it was like. Because books, especially with novels, like, the common advice is, you gotta give them external plot.

So it was like, things always happen to the characters. And I was like, huh, I wonder what would happen if I wrote A novel where the thing that was really happening was her internal lack of esteem and lack of self regard and lack of self worth. That her real battle, like the villain in the story of main character energy, you know, like the hero's journey type of thing, is like her beating down her self doubt. And I was like, oh, that's interesting because yeah, you do have to have external conflicts, but I didn't like have too many external conflicts, which I thought was like kind of a big swing, because that's usually not what they tell you to do in novels. They want the hero fights the villains and they go and they're so courageous. And even if it's like kind of a romance novel, it still follows that where it's very externalized. I personally, I was like, you know what? My external circumstances have not always been my biggest barrier. It's really been me against me. I was the first person to reject myself. I was the first person to tell myself, no. I was the first person to say, you don't deserve that. You don't get to have that, so don't even try. And I'm like, I think that's really relatable.

Yeah, absolutely. It's so relatable. And you've been writing online for a very long time, so it seems like that was part of your journey too. Like, I laughed at the mention that Poppy works at thoughtbuzz because you also spent time working at a almost content farm like place where it would be easy to lose your voice. And even I'm sure there are things you learn during that experience and then also just learning what you don't want. How did you decide that you want to write a novel? Because that's one of those things that. Speaking of like rejecting oneself, I personally am like, I don't know if I have that kind of imagination to it. I also don't have a fire in my belly to try, at least not yet. Maybe someday, but I would find that very intimidating to try to craft the whole fiction novel from scratch. So were you ever intimidated by that? Like, how did this idea drop in for you to even tackle something like this?

Oh my God. I mean, I definitely was intimidated for sure. So what happened was it's more of like a string of events that led me to this point. I had always wanted to write a novel, but as similar to what you say, I was like, that's impossible. You know, Like, I was like, how does anyone even keep an entire narrative in their head at once? And I just felt like I don't know how to do that. And I also was not always really good at just writing consistently, so I really didn't know how I could do it. Okay. So in 2019, I got an agent. Not the same agent that I'm with now, but I got a literary agent for a nonfiction book proposal. And I wanted to, obviously, write, like, a nonfiction book, because to me, what's funny is, like, I feel like a lot of people, it's really hard for them to write about themselves. For me, that's my total comfort zone. Like, I'm like, I will spill out the most vulnerable stuff, and it's just like, send. Put it out. Who cares? You know? Like, it doesn't get to me for some reason, but there are other things that are much more scary to me. So I was like, I guess my path of least resistance would be to write a nonfiction book, because that's what people read from me. I don't know how to write a novel. You also, to get a novel published, you have to, like, write the whole thing first. And I was like, I don't know how to do that. And so I put this book proposal together with this agent. We took it out in the summer of 2019. Fifteen rejections. Real swift and sweet. And I was like, cool. That's great. That was, like, my first real big rejection moment. That hurts. Whoa. I do not like that. Yeah, but I live. I was, like, very glad at the end of my period of mourning. I was very glad that I had done it. Then, for some reason, I don't know what I was thinking. Like, I didn't think, let's revise it. That agent at the time that we obviously parted ways for various reasons, but one of them was, are we not going to work on it? Where are we going? Like, it felt very like, well, we got rejection, so I guess let me know we got something else. I was like, huh? Okay. I wrote a memoir in the winter of 2019, thinking maybe I wanted to write something more narrative. And I wrote that in, like, five weeks. Whoa. How did I do that? Just my complete focus. I write really fast, for better or for worse. I'm a pretty fast writer. That means I have to spend more time in editing, usually. So then I didn't really like that memoir, and I didn't really want that to go anywhere. So I was like, what if I write a novel? I got this idea for a novel and started writing it in the beginning of 2020. Wrote, like, a very fast draft. And when I tell you that was novel zero, it was very novel zero. It was so bad there'd be scenes with no dialogue.

See, I wouldn't even know that that's bad.

Yeah, see? Exactly. Me either. Until I was like, wait a second. How do you actually. When you sit down to write a. You're like, have I ever read anything before?

Seriously? Seriously. Like, it wasn't until this year, 2023, when I started learning about serialized memoir, that she said, you know, Freytag's pyramid? And I'm like, what? Freytag's pyramid. Oh, okay. That thing where you have, like, inciting incident, exposition, the climax. Okay, great. Didn't know that had a name. And then even realizing that for a novel, even how casually you're saying, sit down and write a scene. The novel unfolds in scenes. Mind blown. You need to write scenes. You need to put your characters in situations where there's conflict. Apparently, every scene includes dialogue. I didn't know. I mean, just how many little ingredients have to go in, not to mention the overarching plot of the thing or the character development. It's a lot.

Like, it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. So I wrote this novel, zero. And it was just not good. And I got plenty of feedback that said, no, it's not ready. But what that proved to me and showed me was, one, I can actually write 80,000, 90,000 words. That's wild. Didn't know that. Two, I want to be really good at this. Like, I had that fire. Even though I had written something that wasn't going to go anywhere, I was still like, I want to do it again. And I really don't have that with a lot of things. There are plenty of things that I'm like, I don't give a crap if I'm good at it or not. There's, like, just a few things that get me obsessed and excited. I'm not a workaholic, really. There are very few things that are going to make me want to sit at my desk and, like, pour over something, and this was one of them. The first one that I experienced was when I started doing graphic design. I could spend hours doing graphic design. My mind would just be completely blank, and I'd be having the time of my life. I loved learning design and taught myself design, and this felt like one of those moments. Like, it reminded me of how I felt. When I started working in Photoshop, I was like, well, I guess I'm going to have to work at this.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I actually hired a book coach, and she was amazing. I just needed, like, some accountability, I guess, and I needed someone to just kind of focus. Tell me what you just said. Yes. You have to have a scene, and in every scene, there has to be something. There has to be a rising tide. And then every scene has to make something move forward. And every scene has to include certain things. And it got a little technical, but it helped me understand how to kind of write a story. And before that, I had started reading, like, Save the Cat Writes a Novel and started to understand these, like, story elements that you need to make a pretty compelling story. I read a lot of books on it. And then I got to the point where I was like, enough craft books. Now I have to write. And so I worked with this book coach who was really, really wonderful. And it really just made me understand the structure of story. And also, writing is such a solitary endeavor. The one thing that I just loved about the book coach was like, someone I just say, this is good, you know, and like, wow, cool. Like, you wrote a scene. And I would get feedback on it. She would give me little notes that was like, oh, I love this part. And I'm like, huh, that's cool. And I will say, though, from the book coach, it was edited so much that I. I mean, there's a lot that got changed. And then I had to do a lot on my own. I mean, it wasn't a quick process, and it was more like a process of recognizing that I wasn't super disappointed that the nonfiction didn't Move forward. And granted, I did end up getting a book deal. Roundabout way of someone coming to me to write a nonfiction book. But that was two years after I had gotten those rejections. And by that point, I was already more focused on the novel, and I wrote main character energy before I even wrote radically content. Writing me character energy helped me feel confident writing radically content because I knew I could do it, and that had a really tight deadline. I had only, like, a few months to write it, which is wild. And I just, like, sat down every day and worked on it, cleared my schedule. I told my family I was. Nobody talked to me for, like, a month. I can't even fathom a plan. Even if it's like, three weeks from now, I have to have my whole mind clear. I guess just getting up the nerve to do it and then letting it just be kind of bad. I think for so long, I had never started writing these types of things and endeavoring to write a book because I thought I would be bad at it. And instead I shifted my focus to, like, just be consistent. Just actually do it, and then figure out the rest. I think with writers we really don't understand, especially when we're. We haven't gone through the publishing process. I don't think we really believe how much editing goes into it and revising. Like, you don't believe it. You're like, no, they're all just lying. It's like, no, your first draft is truly.

It's like a guess. Like a random shot in the dark guess.

It's a complete guess.

If you're a basher with Kurt Vonnegut, he says, like, there's two types of writers. The really deliberate ones, they get every sentence right. And then the ones that just, like, bang out a crazy first draft, which is definitely me.

That is definitely me, too. There are times where I've written, like, drafts of stuff that I'm like, oh, that character that I introduced in the beginning has not come back up in, like, 300 pages. And then you just figure it out later. And for me, that's the only way it works. Otherwise, the moment that I start putting a really deliberate, intensive outline together is the moment that I'm like, yeah, this is all gonna change. I'm scared of outlining things. I've heard of writers who write their first draft and throw it away, and then they start from that point. The first draft with every writer is such an important part of the process, and yet I just, for so long, wouldn't allow. I couldn't get past the Block of. I'm not good enough. I can't do this. It's not flowing from the first sentence. I don't know what I'm doing. I remember this was like one of the most profound things because after Novel zero and I was Jamie, dialog, hello. Do you know that you have to put dialogue? It's like so much was what they call exposition, which was like my character just thinking, observing things. And I'm like, there was no scene. So often no one would even know what my character was doing or where they were. And I was just, oh, that's so cute. I was like, okay, I guess I got to figure out how to do dialog. And I thought I was so bad at dialog. I had this whole thing about it. Every time I would know I have to write dialogue, I'd be like, oh.

God, I'm so bad at this.

How do people talk? Have I ever talked before in my whole life? Have I ever spoken? I would be like, how do people speak? And then the feedback that I've gotten from so many people is, the dialogue's so good. They love the dialogue. It was very eye opening to me because it was one of those moments where I was. Maybe my assessment of myself is not always right.

What did you learn makes good dialogue that you didn't know before?

First of all, it has to fit the character and how they would speak in that moment. And also it really has to be a back and forth listening. And good dialogue also has a lot of. They call it like location tags or something where you kind of like place people in the moment. So you have to like, are they drinking something? Are they moving? What's their facial expression? So people are like drawn into it and it's not just like dialogue. But then, I don't know, I think there were times where I would actually record myself speaking and that would be me, but I'd be like, as the characters talking or I'd say it out loud. I did do a whole entire read through of my book saying it out loud. And that helped a lot with kind of making the dialogue more natural. Because if you say something out loud and it's like kind of clunky, it's not going to come out supernatural. I remember I read someone's review, this was when I was reading reviews and someone was like, nobody talks like this in this book. You know, everybody's a therapist. And I'm like, I talk like that with all my friends. I have deep conversations like that all the time. And I kind of like made them less deep so that people would follow along with it more. I think people do talk like that. And I also just made sure to add in. I don't know. I don't even know how I really learned how to do it. I did do some research, but I mostly just kind of let myself write dialogue the way that I speak it and that people speak instead of like this. How do you technically write dialogue?

Right. This is the level of nuance that I think when you're writing narrative, I never realized you need to pay attention to. And because you've done both in such quick succession, writing nonfiction, you get to just write your life like you write what you know. As long as it's not narrative nonfiction, creative. What we're talking about here with the novel. And even the writing coach that I worked with, she's like, in business writing, you have to know things like you're some kind of expert. You just share a process and some examples and stories and research to illustrate that process. And yet, when you're doing narrative nonfiction or narrative fiction, there are so many levels of things to pay attention to. I'm wondering, you mentioned your writing coach. Was that Savannah or one of them Savannah?

Yeah, it was Savannah.

Cause I really enjoyed. I'll put the link to that podcast conversation in the show notes. Did you end up massaging every sentence by the time you were done, draft after draft, had you gone back and not only looked at the structure of the book, but, like, the verb choices, the dialogue, and, like, I don't know, it just seems like every sentence ends up getting put under the magnifying glass when you're working on something like this.

Yes, I would say I probably went through the book 20 times.

Yeah, I know. No one tells you you have to read your own book 20, 30 times. You're like, oh, my God, some people don't read books. Five books in a year, and yet you have to read your own, like, 30 times before it's done.

I know the year that I was revising this the most, I was like, why haven't I read much? I'm like, oh, because I've just been.

Reading the same book.

Yeah. I mean, even when I got revisions from my editor at Parkrow, I read it twice, did the first revision line by line, and then I read it again, so before I even turned it in. Because you do, like, go through everything with a fine tooth comb. And I mean, I wouldn't say that I went on the sentence granular level. I was just listening to a podcast with Barbara Kingsolver she's a very amazing author. She toils with every single sentence. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I don't know if I have it in me to toil with every single sentence. But I do go through and edit pretty finely and as much as I possibly can to just, like, continue. The thing for me that's really hard is not having an objective perspective on the book because I wrote it. And I'm not saying, like, I don't have an objective perspective on how good it is, but it's like, I don't know if little things, like, little details, if I revealed something too quickly. But then if you don't reveal something quick enough, people lose interest. Or, like, how are people perceiving this? How are people going to read this? How are they going to understand the character? I already know what's going to happen. So it's hard to know if, like, am I creating enough narrative tension? Like, all of this stuff? I will say that there's a magic to the process, too, because there's no reason for me to know how to do any of this because I didn't go to school for it. I definitely didn't do any kind of mfa, any of these fancy, like, graduate schools. Nothing. It just, like, has a kind of natural rhythm just from reading so much and kind of having a baseline understanding of story structure. But the thing that excites me the most, really, is I can't wait to just continue to get better. Like, I can't wait to work on it more. I mean, it's one of those things where the more that you do it, the better you're gonna get. I see these authors where if they really devote themselves to their craft, their books just get better and better. They take on more ambitious subject matter, they take on more ambitious stories, and maybe they span cross generations or things like that, or have more multiple point of views and all of this. And I'm like, man, that excites me. And that's how I knew I wanted to write novels, was because it excited me to do the work. And I think that's so important to me because if you just are excited about the result, for me, that's so empty. Even though I am ambitious, but just recognizing that my book came out one day, but I spent three years working on it. So you can't spend three years just not enjoying any of that process because you're waiting for that one day of glory. Obviously, even that one day of glory, like, never lives up to your expectations. If you've got Three years of them built up, right.

And then you have so little control over what happens on the other side. Like I wanna say, oh, yeah, you can just make things happen and you can influence it. But yes and no. Each book has a life of its own and you don't really get to dictate what that is. Like, oh, yeah, this one's going to make the list. It might not. It likely will not. I wouldn't shoot anyone down from having that opium or these big dreams, but you just have so much less influence. I think once it's out and in the world, like, it's going to do what it's going to do and there will still be priceless results. Speaking of which, you mentioned reviews, and it struck me that how on earth does anybody review a novel? Because there are different novels for every different type of taste under the sun. Like, somebody loves a novel like yours with a lot of interiority and the interior hero's journey. And then someone else wants, like, a thriller novel or a murder mystery or, like true crime. And then the reviews must kind of reflect just each individual reader's taste. It's not like a business book where this either worked for me or it didn't. What you're recommending. So what's your relationship to reviews? Do you read them? How do you process them?

I did read them at first when there was early reviews coming in. And some people are pretty good about saying, like, oh, this wasn't my taste. Or some people, five stars. This hits everything I want in a book, you know, And I'm like, okay, we're together now in this relationship for a long time because I'm writing my books for you, babe. I like that. But after a while, there are people that they forget that it's completely subjective. And I think that's when I'm just like, I can't do the reviews. I don't look at reviews. I will probably never look at reviews again because I could sense that it'll get in my head. And I have so many more books to write in me. I can't let them let the reviews get in my head. Especially with novels. You can consume a novel, read a novel, and how you perceive it, how you enjoy it, could be based on your mood, what's going on with you that day, or not, or if there's something that you don't like, or this or that. There was someone that, like, didn't like that. I didn't include the immigration process for France. And I was like, I mean, you only have so much. That's a whole thing. If I really went into the immigration process, which, like, I know the immigration process and I don't. That's just personal preference. But you get to the point where you're just, I'm not going to find what I want in these reviews. Even the really nice ones, you can't take too seriously. That's with praise or criticism. I have to personally learn how to, like, not take either of them too seriously. Because after a while, you got to do the book that you have to do. Although I will say I'm probably of the rare person where if I see the same critique over and over, I definitely will take it under advisement in my next work. And I'll say, hmm, okay, maybe they had a point there. Especially if it's presented in, like, a kind manner.

Right.

You know, and if it's mean, I'm. But I don't really read them because I don't really know that if there's like, a reason to. And eventually I might like for future books, I have an idea of potentially having a friend send me the good ones, the nice ones, because those are nice to receive. You know, you don't write your book to not have anyone ever read it.

We'll be right back, just after this.

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I've always wondered about this, and I agree. Usually for me too. There's a book in me that wants to be written, and it can almost only be written in the way that it shapes itself from within me, like, whatever the download is. And I would rather get rejected by publishers than change it because I can only write the one book that's in me to write in that moment. Kind of. I'm not explaining it very well, but when it comes to feedback, it's always struck me as so true, but also so odd, where it's like, don't read it and don't let the bad feedback go to your heart and don't let the good feedback go to your head. But like you said, it's kind of like, doesn't the good feedback let you know what people liked, what worked, that your book is resonating? It would be so hard not to consider the good feedback. And then the bad feedback is often personal taste. And you really cannot please everyone. In fact, you do have to make choices that will, by definition, turn off a lot of people. So I think that's part of what people are saying when it comes to the, quote, bad reviews, if it's not just constructive feedback given with love and a genuine desire for improvement. But I've always found it a little hard to be like, oh, yeah, but don't listen to the good feedback either, because isn't that part of what you're trying to achieve is, you know, what people would say in the good stuff?

Right. I mean, exactly. I like when I get messages and nice things that people say on social media. That feels to me a little bit safer than having to go wade through, like, everybody's preferences. But, yes, those are the types of things where I'm a new novelist, relatively, and I'm like, oh, okay, so I'm good at character development. I'm good at dialog. I'm good at setting the scene and bringing people into the location. Like, these are three things I didn't know I was good at, you know, and it's really nice to get that feedback and know that, you know, it's one less thing to have to worry about than knowing, like, maybe I'm a little bit weaker in these areas and maybe I need to improve in these areas, and that's okay. That, to me, feels like a really nice way of engaging with feedback. I just know for me, it gets to a certain point where I'm like, I can't input anymore. But you're right, I like to know what people are connecting with. For example, I actually didn't know that I had created such a great cast of characters. And not because I doubt myself. Well, some of it is that. But, like, also because it's very hard to be objective and even subjective about your work. And the positive feedback that I kept getting about the book was, I didn't want it to end. I want these characters to continue. I, like, want to live in this book, in this world that you created. And I was like, huh? So I guess creating characters is something that I am good at. Actually gave me ideas for my next book of, okay, how do I incorporate more ensemble, more characters into this? Because I love a cast of characters. I love that. And if I know that I'm strong in that area, that's really great. And especially because when you look at different authors, there are some people, some authors that they're incredibly lyrical with the way that they write. And then there are some authors that they're incredibly bare bones with how they write, but their tension and the way that they create plot is so engaging. And I wouldn't want either of them to swap. And so that's when, like, it's hard with the subjective criticism and the more like, taste and preferences. There's a time and a place for Blake Crouch, for example, who has written a bunch of sci fi books. He doesn't even do paragraphs. Basically, it's like line, sentence after sentence after sentence. It moves so fast. And it's not incredibly hard to read. I mean, the concepts are kind of hard. But then you have someone like Ann Patchett, where it's so lyrical, you're kind of even having to reread some places to understand what she's saying. And it's like, I don't want either of them to stop doing what they're doing. And so that's great. They know what is very unique to them, knowing what it is your strong points are. And that's hard to get from yourself sometimes. You do need trusted people or even like, the readers that are going to read your books every time they come out. I'm not going to write for you. Exactly. Because I want to write the book that I want to write. But I also like to know what's resonating.

Yes. And I know you and I have talked offline about how I've had my own insecurities. Oh, I don't look like Joan Didion. You know, I don't have the look of this, like, literary writer, fiction, nonfiction, or the really flowery or, like, ultra intellectual. You can tell they got an mfa or they have, like you said, the most lyrical, flowery, like, gorgeous, descriptive writing. And that will likely never be me. I mean, I can try and I can try to improve, but it's not the thing that comes naturally. And so I love the way you put that. The last question before the actual last one when we wrap up. You wrote very beautifully recently on your substack plot twist about envy, and that's a theme that's come up many times on the Pivot podcast. And free time is just, you know, when we're pursuing these goals and we're so passionate about the craft and learning and publishing and it is vulnerable to.

Put work out there.

How have you managed it's vulnerable having a book out there. And for me, the. Whatever you want to call it, envy, jealousy, compare and despair. The jealousies was the term that you like, co invented long ago. Of course it's going to come up because we're just like seeing what everyone else is doing and oh, this person's a bestseller and they got there in half the time and they have twice as many reviews or if not 10x and just curious for your take on how that arises for you and how you deal with it when it inevitably shows up.

It leads me down the spiritual path. It's probably one of the things that actually brings me back to my spirituality and gets me on my knees because I'm just. I don't get it. I don't get how it happens for some people at 18 years old. And for some people it won't happen until they're 50. And for some people it'll never happen. Like, I don't get it. It can't just be one's good and one's not. That's clearly not it. Because there's genius in so many forms and I get to the place where I feel it and then I'm just okay. What's meant for me will be. I'm on my own unique path. There is no need to compare. There's a reason why it's happening in the timing that it's happening because there's no actual way to, like, work through it logically. Oh, maybe they worked harder. I didn't work hard enough, or I didn't do enough on TikTok, or I didn't do enough. This. For every one person that like went viral on TikTok, there's thousands others that have done the same amount of work, the same amount of research, the same amount of time and didn't. And I'm not saying none of that is possible. It's just for me, there's no real logical way, even though my brain craves it. We want answers. We want answers. We want to know if there's a direct way to figure it out. And what can I do every day? And I have a Capricorn rising. It's like very by the book. Figure it out, get a plan and then I just do my best. I work at my pace. I have to accept and love where I'm at. It always makes sense. It's always working in my favor and just really trust that. And that's the only thing that kind of brings me back. And then recently I've been off social media because I noticed I went off social media and thought that I'd go back immediately. And then I ended up taking a pretty long break that has continued. And I was like, I literally do not feel bad about myself ever if I don't go on social media. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with that information. Like, that's not okay. You know, I'm like, I don't have anything to compare myself to if I don't expose myself to it. And as much as I would love to be able to just consume a bunch of strangers accomplishments all the time, I guess it's still like, just not good for me. And I think there's plenty of people on social media where they don't want to do those things, so it's easy. I can be so excited about every musician that does all the things I'm like, their joy is my joy. Every musician, because I don't want to be a musician. But when it comes to the things that I want to do, I just have to know my limits. And I feel like sometimes I shame myself. I'm like, no, you should be able to be happy for everyone that ever exists in the world. And I don't know. There's competition. There is a real thing of there's a competition for resources, like, especially in publishing. There's only so many books that can be promoted at once. There's only so much advance money that they can give. There's only so much that people are putting in the time and energy for. There's only so many agents and it's okay for me. That feels very good to admit and acknowledge that, like it's a competitive business, like it's a business and it's not about all my feelings and all those things and that sometimes I have to know how to put my blinders on, do my work, be on my path because there's no rhyme or reason. There are some people that their first book is a total runaway bestseller or, you know, I think of Rebecca Yarros her book is 4th Wing, and it's just like the biggest sensation right now. But it's also her, like, 15th, 16th book. She's been writing for freaking years. And I'm like, how do we make sense of that? And I just kind of look and go, everyone's path is gonna be what it is. And for me to expect that my path should be, like, this person that I'm envious of, that's a recipe for me feeling very miserable and not really doing my best work at the end of the day.

I know. Well, that's the number one reason I can't be on social media, because I'll just compare. That's like what I do. If you put social in front of me, I compare and despair, or I worry I have guilt. It's like, pick whichever emotion. And I think I said this to you on our last Pivot podcast, where I'm like, I could go to therapy for it, or I could just turn it off. I could just not sign in. Our brains weren't actually designed to have the entire planet thrown in our face all day and still try to get work done. That's really not how the machinery is designed. And so I love what you're saying, too, of reminding us that while our mind wants answers, a logical reason, well, they did this. So then if I do that, or why. Why did their book make a list or sell this many than mine? And. But it's not. It's not logical. There is a spiritual intelligence to it. At least I believe that as well. So if you could leave listeners with a permission slip, maybe even aspiring novelists permission slip, to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

To be a novelist, I think you have to absolutely drop the perfectionism and at least in the beginning, let it be messy, uncertainty. Let yourself discover how it is you even work, what you're even good at, what you need to improve on. Because take it from me, if it's all happening in your head, you don't know yet, and there's so much wisdom in the action, and it's honestly the most freeing thing to just go, you know what? I'm going to let this be novel zero. That's what I called it, Novel zero. It doesn't have to go anywhere. It doesn't even have to be any good. It just needs to get out of me. And then you're off. That's the momentum. Giving myself that permission opened up a whole book of my creativity that I had been trying to access for almost 20 years.

I love. There's wisdom in action and they can read a whole book like if you want to go on this journey, this exact journey of our inner language to ourselves about the creative process. That's what you did. Captures so beautifully in main character energy. So I will plug the book one more time and this definitely place should become a movie. I know you live in the greater LA area, but I'm going to send those thoughts out into the world main character energy because life is too short to play a supporting role. Bam. Is there anywhere else you want to send people to learn more or keep in touch?

You can find me on my substack at Plot Twist and I will be back on social media at some point but on my Instagram too. And you can always email me. My website is jamievarren.com and would love to hear from you. Of course.

Amazing. I'll put all this in the show notes. Jamie, thank you so much for being here. As always, it's a joy and a delight to just be on our winding paths together. I'm sure I said it before, but I'll say it again. So thank you so much.

Thank you for having me underscore.

Bye.

Thanks everybody for listening.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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