[Interview]: Zachary Dillon

Self-publishing a novel, how your writing process changes through writing a book, and the effects of keeping a writing project a secret.

Welcome! Here’s another writer interview with my friend Zachary Dillon, the author of I Hear You Watching, a psychological novel based on his experiences with hearing voices. (It’s serialized on Substack for free; you can also purchase the book here.)

First, this post is definitely too long for email; click here to read in the browser.

Second, we’re trying something new this time. Normally, I would respond to what the interviewee says to most of the questions, but this time I’m not going to do that here. I want you, the great “Dear Reader”, to be as much a part of this as we are. So, in the spirit of trying something different, I’m leaving my writing questions and Zachary’s answers here in this post, but my responses to him will be through restacks of his responses. That way, you can respond with me, and Zachary can respond to you in turn.

To see my responses to him, check the history of restacks on this post; I label my responses so you can easily correspond them to Zachary’s answers.

Okay, here we go!

(By the way, this interview is one of several; check out this page for a list of other interviews.)

1. What made you decide to post your pieces on Substack, as opposed to chasing literary magazines or other traditional publishing routes? What drew you to the platform? What’s been your experience so far? What are some things you wish Substack did differently?

I came to Substack by accident, two years after publishing my novel I Hear You Watching.

The book is about a guy reckoning with the ugly parts of his mind, which he experiences as voices he believes are neighbors stalking him. The story is closely based on my own lived experience with auditory hallucinations. Everyone who reads the book praises its “brutal honesty,” but I think that’s exactly what kills its chances with a big publisher. It’s an uncomfortable book, and I’m a nobody, so getting a corporation to put time and money behind it is too big an ask.

I submitted to some agents, contests, and the couple of indie presses that were miraculously open for unsolicited submissions at the time, but I got sick of waiting for someone to tell me my book was worthy of being published.

During revisions I also wrote weekly flash fiction on my personal site, and eventually had enough to make a book, so I commissioned artist friends to illustrate the stories and used that book (People With Problems) as a self-publishing practice run.

A year later, when my novel was ready, I published it myself. That was in 2023.

Then came the problem of marketing a debut novel by a nobody with zero social media presence. I contacted various mental health-oriented podcasts about my book, and got the attention of one called Happiful: Finding What Works. The host liked my book and invited me on alongside a mindfulness expert and a clinical psychologist. I loved the experience, but it still didn’t get me enough clout to land appearances elsewhere.

I also sent cold messages to big and medium names, in various fields from psychology to stand-up comedy, who I thought would like my book.

One of these humble-but-bold messages went to someone whose online presence was mostly on Substack. I had to make an account to message them, and when the sign-up process had me create a publication, I decided to name it after my book, copy/pasted the first chapter into a blank post, and scheduled it to go live the following Tuesday.

That was in December 2024, and the whole book finished posting in October 2025.

My experience has been great. I’ve discovered incredible writers whose work electrifies and inspires me, and I’ve collected many thoughtful and enthusiastic readers—some of whom kept up with my weekly chapters through the entire year!

And what do I wish Substack did differently? Well, let’s just say if you’re cynical about Notes, you haven’t been here long enough to really get mad… Sometimes this platform feels like an elaborate troll on us fiction writers. But this answer is long enough already.

2. Do you have any tips for people starting out on Substack?

Read and support what you like.

Don’t be shy about posting about your own stuff (something I still need to work on), but keep plugs of your own stuff to near-zero in comments. Genuine engagement with other people’s work cultivates interest in your own work—not only from other readers but also from the algorithm itself.

A lot of the big fish are too big to notice us little fish. There’s more strength in forming cults of little fish. My friends and I are proof of that.

There’s something amazing happening in Substack fiction—and serials specifically—despite the app’s best attempts to ignore us.

3. I’ve heard it widely attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci that “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” What do you think of that? How do you know, or reasonably suspect, that a piece is “finished?”

I Hear You Watching was finished when I noticed myself making tweaks that changed it without improving it. Removing commas I’d added in the previous pass, or vice-versa.

I think the real test is whether every page keeps you engaged—even though you’re the author. Whenever I see a new reader like or repost a chapter, I pull my book from the shelf, flip to where they are, and try to see it fresh through their eyes. Of course it’s impossible to do, but every time I attempt this exercise I find myself absorbed enough to keep turning the page.

This is embarrassing to admit, because it makes me sound “high on my own supply,” but I absolutely am! I write things I like to read. I mean, if you don’t like what you write, why would you try to make other people read it?

So that’s a simpler way to say it—I know a story is finished when I do more gazing than tweaking.

4. For me, calling myself a writer was very much like a kind of religious reawakening: there were long drought periods in my life where I didn’t write at all, or only jotted down a few words here and there, while there were other periods, mostly in high school, where my writing work ethic was feverishly prolific. My joining Substack was essentially a declaration of my conversion, my acceptance that I am a writer and I need to do this. Have you had a similar experience? If so, what finally got you to start writing? If not, did you just fall into writing one day? What was that like?

I wanted to write for most of my life. In my 20s and into my 30s, I worked on many projects I assumed would be my debut novel. I spent a lot of time ruminating, and only wrote when I felt I had something worth putting down. This resulted in a lot of looping back and polishing of previous passages, which made me feel like I was “doing the work,” but I still felt funny calling myself a writer.

One of those novel attempts lasted nine years, resulting in a pile of disjointed notes (mostly about symbolism) and only 40 pages of contiguous passages. Still, I was determined to finish that book for two reasons:

1. The sunk cost fallacy, because the alternative was throwing away nine years of work.

2. If I ever wanted to write about my wild true-life experience (I Hear You Watching), I first had to learn how to write a book, any book, to ensure I could do that personal experience justice.

That nine-year project was heavy baggage, and eventually I decided to start fresh on I Hear You Watching, the project I actually wanted to write. The new story was so exciting to me that I kept a pace of ~1,000 words a day six days a week. No more ruminating, I only thought about writing when I was actively typing, and the rest of the day my mind was free for everything else. But that consistent practice meant my subconscious was puzzling things out even in the off time. Often I’d leave my writing in the middle of a tough problem, totally forget about it, and sit down the next day to discover a solution to that problem had magically arrived.

The habit took work to establish, but once that happened, the previously arduous stuff became surprisingly easy.

That’s when I started calling myself a writer.

5. Do you have any rituals you swear by in your writing process? Whether that’s methods for coming up with ideas, or getting yourself actually in the chair and writing? I don’t think the development of any story is typical, but are there common patterns to the process from the germ of an idea to a finished piece of writing, or anything in between?

For years, my biggest block was preciousness.

Keeping to 1,000 words a day writing and rewriting I Hear You Watching turned it into a habit rather than something sacred or important. Just like I’d have to eat a certain amount in a day, I had to write a certain amount. It got so I could jump in any time I had a spare five minutes. In fact, I’d say at least 50% of the first three drafts were written on my phone.

I also printed a template showing three calendar months, hung it on the wall with a pen on a string, and I wrote my word count every day. At the end of each week, I added up the week’s words to get that dopamine hit of seeing the numbers get bigger.

I also took a day off each week. Sometimes two, but two days away from it made me feel a little too foggy for comfort.

Process-wise, I always thought of myself as what the internet calls a “pantser.” Any time I tried making an outline for something, my interest shriveled, and I love writing toward discovery. I love the serendipity of the subconscious. But I confess I wrote I Hear You Watching with an outline—not one I made up, but one of lived experience. It gave direction to each session at the keyboard, because I always knew I had to eventually get to point B, then eventually C, and D, so between those points I could allow myself to meander and pick up walking sticks and cool rocks on the way. Some of those little discoveries were dead ends and got cut, but many became vital to the book.

So I don’t have a set ritual, because I Hear You Watching contradicted everything I thought I knew about my process. I thought I was slow, but I finished the first draft in four months. I thought I’d just wing everything, but I actually used a map.

The one thing that’s remained consistent is that I almost always write with music. I have ever-shifting, project-specific playlists, and I’ll often have certain songs to fuel certain scenes or tones. But I also make a point of doing later revisions without music. I forget who it was, but I heard an author mention writing with music and editing in silence—the music inspires and supports the early drafts, and then you have to turn off the music to make sure it’s your language and story that are hitting the emotional beats you want and not just your playlist.

6. Is there anything in the works that you’re comfortable sharing as a tease? Tell me what you can about it, but I’m also curious if writing this was a walk in the park or a prolonged, one-sided boxing match.

Since publishing I Hear You Watching in 2023, I’ve had a number of false starts, abandoned outlines, finished outlines but abandoned books, and other scribblings. Each one I was positive would be the next book, until it wasn’t. Sort of the writerly equivalent of Are You My Mother?

But now I think I’ve got the next book.

No, really.

It’s an idea I’ve been kicking around a while, and it’s outlasted the others and keeps getting bigger. At this point I can’t say much about it. Not out of superstition or fear of “idea thieves,” but to keep myself invested.

Up until I Hear You Watching, I blabbed about my writing ideas to anyone who would listen. I got near-unanimous enthusiasm, which made me blab more. But blabbing made me subconsciously feel like I’d already done the work.

So when I started I Hear You Watching, I didn’t tell anyone about it. Not even my wife. She knew I was writing a book, and she knew the book’s subject, but she didn’t read a word of it until a year and a half later, when I finished the third draft and finally felt it was ready for her eyes.

That silence was the key, because I knew if I kept it a secret, the only way anyone would ever find out about the book was if I finished it.

Secrecy also freed me up to explore, make whatever missteps, change, delete, etc., and nobody had to know. The more I worked, the better the book got, and the more excited I was to reveal it. The longer I held out, the bigger the surprise would be for my wife and everyone else.

So about the next book I’ll say that it’s not as blatantly autobiographical as I Hear You Watching, but it’s just as personal, just as existentially terrifying, and somehow a lot weirder…

Subscribe/follow and stay tuned to see if and how I make good on this promise.

Something I can tell you about that’s coming out sooner is a smaller piece of interactive fiction. I wrote it for the ECTOCOMP interactive fiction game jam in 2024, which provided the constraint that entries had to be written in four hours. The result was a fun little bit of existential terror about parental identity. But with so little time I didn’t quite reach the ending(s) I’d originally aimed for, so I’ve gone back to revise and expand it. If it’s not already available as you read this, it’s coming very soon.

7. In my writing critique group, the Tampa Writer’s Alliance, I once submitted an early draft of what became “A lost young man with enormous wings.” One critic in that group said she thought the protagonist was suffering from some supernatural, explosive flatulence—a reading so bizarre and out of left field for me (though, I could see how she might have come to that interpretation) it was impossible for me to hide my shock. Have you ever had a reader give your work a reaction or interpretation that was unexpected or surprising? Or, maybe gave you a new perspective on your own piece?

I wrote a short story about an auto mechanic who discovers a car he’s working on has small, dead clowns hidden in its various nooks and crannies, and he fantasizes about making a fortune by turning them into a roadside attraction. One reader told me he saw the story as a metaphor for American immigration policy.

It’s a stretch, but then so is discovering a car full of dead clowns.

8. Do you have a trusted person you run your stories by before you post them? For me, it’s my wife. What’s been your experience with this person?

My wife is my first reader, always and forever, and she’s given me some of the most extreme left-field readings of my work. I think I’ve blocked the biggest ones out because they’ve also been some of the most frustrating criticisms I’ve received. They’ve left me thinking, “We’re married—you of all people should like/understand this!” It kills me that I can’t remember a specific anecdote right now, because those comments have also been some of the most powerful learning experiences for me as a writer, and the stories in question bounced back way stronger for it.

In general, I have to make sure I’ve taken a piece as far as I can by myself before showing it to her, otherwise she’ll go poking all kinds of annoying holes into the stuff I haven’t figured out yet.

Like I said, I didn’t let her read a word of I Hear You Watching until I’d spent a year and a half rewriting it three times from scratch.

9. Whether in a workshop or social setting, do you interact with writers outside of Substack? What about writing conferences? If so, do you notice a difference in your encounters with Substackers compared to writers out “in the wild?”

I met with a writing group in Paris, and we each read a story aloud for the group to discuss. I read a flash fiction story of mine that’s told all in dialogue among a group of identical women who call each other “sister.” They’re planning to play a trick on a stranger wherein they all wear the same outfit and appear in various places throughout the stranger’s day, leading the stranger to believe that a woman is following him and somehow zapping herself from place to place. The trick’s description grows more and more sinister as the sisters’ discussion goes on, and even to the reader it becomes unclear whether the characters are simply identical twins or something more supernatural.

The writing group wasn’t sure what to make of the story. One writer said I should make it absolutely clear the women were witches. I told her they might not be, that I felt the story was more about the reader eavesdropping on the conversation and imagining the paranoia they’d feel as the target of such a trick. But she maintained that the point of the story was to discover whether the women were witches.

The group’s host said my story reminded him of Shirley Jackson (which was flattering, as Jackson is a hero of mine), but then agreed that keeping the characters’ true nature ambiguous “completely abandons the reader” and is therefore a big no-no.

I pointed out that in Jackson’s story “The Lottery” we never find out why the whole town stones a woman to death, and I asked whether that lingering question bothered him, the host. He said, “Well, that story works because we know the townsfolk are townsfolk.”

That was the last time I met with that group.

In all seriousness, I do love the format of writing groups. I cut my teeth in my college fiction workshops. One of the most valuable aspects about those workshops was that the author had to remain silent while the class pulled their story apart, and they could only respond once everyone else had nothing more to say. This meant hearing interpretations you may not agree with and accepting them as honest, (mostly) valid reactions to what you’d created, which is super important.

Those two “they have to be witches” reactions were fascinating to receive. Ultimately I didn’t change the story because that critique refused to engage with what I felt was the true focus of the story, and those were the only two readers who felt that way out of a literal hundred who’d read it. But every reaction (unless it’s a generic “good,” “bad,” or “interesting”) teaches me something about what I’ve written and how it’s read.

Fiction is a psychedelic drug that makes the reader hallucinate the story. As writer-chemists, we can tweak the molecules all we want, but what actually happens to the reader is wholly dependent on the content of their brain, their perspective and life experience (and don’t forget set and setting 😉).

I get a lot of valuable shop talk exchanges through Substack, so I’ve found a (very large, amorphous) writing group. I also plan to use my publication as a sort of beta read zone for my next novel. We’ll see how that goes.

10. I must admit, I was a bit underwhelmed when I first posted on Substack. I had it in my head that posting a story would be like submitting my dissertation for approval all over again, and it would be like that every time I posted something. (I still feel this on some level—I don’t think it’ll ever fully go away—but it’s gotten easier with each post.) And once the story was submitted I’d get a bunch of people telling me how horrible or derivative or degenerate my stories were. But instead, at first I got no responses; when I started getting engagement, I found them to be essentially universally positive. What was it like for you both before and after you courageously posted your first piece on Substack? Did you notice any immediate changes in yourself from it? How do you feel about posting now?

The response to I Hear You Watching has been very gratifying. There’s a lot of uncomfortable stuff in the book’s first 50 pages, so joining Substack and posting those first chapters while trying to make friends with strangers was nerve-wracking. But I got a handful of reads, a couple of people left some encouraging comments, and to my surprise they proceeded to read as I posted the rest of the book. Others popped in later for a chapter or two, some for longer, but that small contingent of constant readers continued to grow, and they’ve become friends in the process, and that’s a beautiful thing.

Now I mostly vacillate between “why aren’t more people reading my brilliant masterpiece?” and “I can’t believe someone left a nice comment on my macaroni picture!”

It’s also amazing to get to do stuff like this interview. Thanks again for asking me!

11. Are there any themes or ideas or techniques, even, in your work that you (maybe secretly) wish more readers would recognize? And more broadly, how do you feel about the interaction between a reader and a writer in understanding or making meaning of a piece? Do you think author intent has a role to play?

I’m a very visual thinker, which plays a significant role in my writing process. But I know that Siri Hustvedt, an author I admire, says she can’t form mental pictures of anything. It’s called aphantasia¹. It’s not a condition, it’s just one of many different ways human minds interpret the experience of being alive. I also know Hustvedt loves some of the same books I love, and for some of the same reasons—but clearly our experiences of reading and remembering those books are vastly different.

I had a friend in high school who told me he didn’t think in pictures but rather in numbers. Twenty years later, I still think about that fact often, because I have no idea what the fuck it means about what it’s like to exist in his mind versus mine, and trying to understand it makes my breathing go shallow.

So, knowing that my ever-so-noble authorial intent shatters as soon as my words enter someone else’s head, I do my best to be loyal to what’s in my own head and what’s felt in my own heart and body, because it’s all I have to go on. Then, if I can put my brain in “safe mode”—ignoring all background knowledge and experience particular to me (which is of course impossible, but I try to get as close as I can)—and have my writing trigger the thoughts and feelings I’ve deemed necessary for it to convey, that’s success.

Then if I give it to someone else, and the Venn diagram of their impressions has overlap that confirms, expands, or transforms my intent without ignoring or completely contradicting it, then high five. I did the thing.

Things I wish more readers would recognize? Absolutely.

There’s a lot of hidden symmetry in I Hear You Watching. Alex’s descent into madness and climb back out of the darkness is the most zoomed-out, obvious symmetry, but within that are countless smaller fractal symmetries—some of which are the result of my authorial intent, and some of which are purely accidental, the synchronicity of subconscious (my favorite stuff).

An example…

There’s an important video in the first and last pages of the book. At the beginning, it’s a porn clip Alex is watching for his own personal, uh, “gratification.” Then comes the story’s whole paranoid nightmare rollercoaster of surveillance and judgment, and just as the car pulls back into the station a couple pages from the end, Alex sees a video someone posted of him having a psychotic episode, and people online are laughing at it.

The porn clip is Alex being gratified by a recording of someone else’s vulnerability, and the YouTube clip is others being gratified by a recording of his vulnerability. Two pages from the beginning, and two pages from the end.

This was a happy accident.

Of course I worked harder on this book than I ever have on anything, so there’s a lot of important and/or secret stuff in there that is my doing. Plus the story is about apophenia and patterns in coincidence, so I had fun with that.

There’s a lot more for readers to dig up.

12. The other day I posted a Note about how a Tame Impala song (“Let It Happen”) feels like a drug-induced kind of experience for me under the right circumstances. I said it set my brain ablaze like a wild forest fire and had me dreaming aloud. Music does that to me. Do you have any ritual like listening to music that gets the inspiration flowing?

I almost always listen to music while writing. As I mentioned before, each project has a playlist I play on shuffle. Or if I need a particular tone or have a specific song obsession I can listen to something on repeat. I loved certain sections of one song so much I cut those pieces out, strung them together into a seamlessly looping mp3 less than two minutes long that looped seamlessly, and wrote to it for several hours.

13. Harold Bloom was a (controversial but brilliant) literary critic who most famously put out his “agon” theory of literature—the idea that authors struggle to surpass the skill of those past writers who’ve influenced them and the culture at large. He calls this the “anxiety of influence.” For me, I can understand how he could argue this: I waffle between inspiration and doomsday jealousy when I read a writer I’m especially in awe of. As a writer yourself, what do you think of this (summary of the) idea? How do you think the writers you enjoy influence or directly affect your own work and process, if at all?

Writers I love influence my process in that I don’t aspire to do what they do, but I aspire to do what I do as well as they do what they do.

The difference between our work is still very clearly delineated for me, because even absorbing interviews, commentaries, annotations, etc., I only experience the end result of their work, whereas I’m present for every single slippery step of creating my own work—writing in the bathroom, in my underwear, struggling against sleep on the train, pages and pages of boring, cliché nonsense. Theirs is a self-contained piece of staggering art. Mine is the best macaroni picture I could muster.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think my macaroni picture can stir readers’ guts or part the clouds and shoot readers in the face with a blinding beam of truth! But I will always see the macaroni.

And on the subject of aspiring to surpass my influences, I periodically return to an interview clip wherein Dan Harmon points out that most of us like to consume art we couldn’t have created ourselves, which sets a punishing bar for our own work. We sit down to our work inspired by what we can’t do and paralyzed by the knowledge that we can’t do it.

Learning from others’ work and aspiring to improve are how we grow, but comparison is a trap.

14. I’m interested in your educational background when it comes to the craft of writing. Generally, how did you go about teaching yourself how to write when you started? Are there things you do or read to help you “keep up your chops” at writing? Have you ever done any formal schooling to train as a writer? (I have not; the closest I ever got were two literature electives in undergrad.) What kinds of things give you a strong and reliable signal that you’re progressing in a way that satisfies you in your refining of the craft, if any? Of course, you could endlessly practice; but what are some signs that you’re doing more than simply spinning your wheels forever?

I’ve wanted to write since I could remember. Wrote and illustrated my first story when I was six. Through my teens and twenties were lots of bad stories and false starts on novels while I toiled under the assumption that I had to get good at making stuff up. I didn’t yet know how to transmogrify and build on my own thoughts, interests, and experiences.

I got a Bachelor’s in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, a highlight of which was an advanced workshop taught by T.C. Boyle. I learned a lot about writing, but in hindsight I wouldn’t say it was indispensable, it was just one way of exposing myself to other people, other work, other perspectives and experiences.

After that came another twelve years of overthinking and handwringing before I learned to stop taking it so seriously and write in my underwear—literally and figuratively.

I learned that when I have an idea, I shouldn’t lock it in a vice and interrogate it from every angle. That’s the fastest way to kill an idea. I used to literally ask myself stuff like, “Other parts of the story feature symbolic concentric circles—does this new idea have some way to weave in another concentric circle image?” and if the answer was no, I’d toss the idea and feel like all that thinking was a complete waste of time.

I’m exhausted just remembering this version of my process.

Now when things drift downstream and I scoop them out and plop them on the shore with the other stuff I’ve found, I don’t look at them too closely, I even let my eyes go blurry until I’ve got enough to feel like a book. Then I step back and look at the whole mess to see what’s interesting in it, which things connect or congeal, which things are just stuck-on garbage. I try not to think about symbols until later drafts, which is difficult in a long project, especially because my mind is wired for that aforementioned apophenia and symbolic thinking. But it’s so much more fun to discover patterns and symbols than impose them.

I also learned that deleting material is important progress (and can be a bit addictive). I mean, when a sculptor chips away part of a block, would you call that wasted material? Every chip removed leaves negative space that informs what’s left behind.

Lucky for us, writing is the most malleable art form (which is part of why this interview has taken me so long to get back to you²). Even when you remove something, you could put it back, or put part of it back, or move it somewhere else, or re-add all the sentences in reverse order. They’re all valid exploration.

That playful perspective was a huge level-up in my writing practice.

15. I try my best not to pressure my brain into forging a brand new story from the clear blue sky. I like to let ideas simmer, slow cook, percolate for a while, until I feel like I have enough to start putting pen to paper. Over time I’ve learned how to fine-tune the feeling so I don’t get stuck in the trap of endlessly ruminating on a story without ever writing anything down. But in general, I have a slow process, and I’ve come to enjoy it that way. I think of story ideas as like photos that bloom into my brain over time, with details becoming clearer as I stare at and contemplate the story over and over again. How do you come up with new story ideas? How do you know, when you get an idea, that it’s worth pursuing further? Have you ever had any story ideas you felt were “flops”—those resistant to your natural process—or in general you felt were going nowhere? What do you do, if anything, with those ideas that seem to drag their feet?

From the seven months I spent spitting out a unique piece of flash fiction every week, I learned that ideas are a dime a dozen. Some of my favorite stories of the bunch came from free-writing random crap until my mind caught on a sentence and wrote a follow-up sentence, and then suddenly I was writing a story.

A lot of writers—especially early writers—covet “ideas.” The reality is, any basic idea you come up with could be dismissed with a comparison to some preexisting story by somebody else. The real magic is how you grow that idea into a story.

The trick is, not all ideas will grow into stories, or sometimes you’re not the gardener for the job.

There’s almost always a slow-down or brick-wall moment in a writing project, and the longer the story the more likely those moments become. I used to think that was the time to set it aside and give it space, which is sometimes the right move, but more often I’ve found that it means I need to approach it from a different angle. Change perspective—sometimes literally—just to re-oxygenate the story’s blood. And as with sleeping limbs, I get awful pins and needles when I do it, but if I can push through those I often discover something helpful.

Being open to what a story can become means it’s not limited by what I think I want it to be.

What’s the heart of the story? Keep that, change everything else, and see what happens. The beauty of writing is you can always change it back or try something else.

16. I sometimes can’t help but feel overwhelmed by Substack. There are many great writers on here, each prolific in such a way that my “Saved” tab is essentially useless now. In my less confident moments, I feel this nihilistic sense of overwhelm about my work getting drowned out by all the others. But then I think about Candide and his closing remarks in his book to “cultivate your garden,” a battle cry of faith in the process of doing good work and being patient with the results. To not try to swallow the whole world in one bite. Assuming I haven’t just now thrown you into an existential panic, has this feeling ever come down and breathed down your neck? If so, what do you think about it, or maybe how do you combat the feeling of overwhelm as a writer?

In the past year on Substack, I’ve connected with so many wonderful people and discovered such amazing stories and books. Once my book finished posting last October I took what I thought would be a one- or two-week break that wound up stretching into February. At first it was because I was burnt out. Then it stretched on because I had a backlog of Subtack reading to catch up on. I felt bad for having disappeared, and I assumed if I liked or restacked anything, people would see that I was back and wonder why I wasn’t reading their work. I even felt like you, Ricardo, would see that activity and wonder why the hell it was taking me so long to do this interview³! Even though you’d been super cool and patient about it the whole time. But that was all just guilt I was piling on myself.

I’ll admit I’ve seen other writers disappear for stretches, so I have to forgive myself for doing the same. Logging off is essential to the process.

Keeping up with reading is difficult because there’s so much good stuff. My favorite things to read and write are long-form, and it killed me that I was doing a lot of flitting around and not actually finishing many of the serials I started reading (and enjoyed!) because I constantly felt like there was something new to grab onto or keep up with. But I’ve realized that was normal—I was new and finding my footing in Substack fiction.

Now that I’ve settled in, I’m being more selective and intentional. I’ve made peace with the fact that I have trouble keeping up with reading stuff in real time—it either posts too fast or too slow. So if I wind up reading something a while after it’s finished posting (like your novella), that’s okay. A lot of people here have incredible back catalogues that are going completely undiscovered because of the constant fount of new work, so there’s merit in celebrating that previous work. Reading and sharing means giving them another trip through the discoverability pinball machine.

17. Have you noticed anything about your writing life that has crept in to other parts of your life? As an example, I have definitely felt emotional benefits to getting my thoughts down on paper; I’ve also noticed that my developing a writing routine is a habit that has bled into my maintenance of a gym routine, something I’ve struggled with for a while. My writing habit has also made me more conscious and protective of my free time, now that I’m hyperaware of how much time it really times to put good effort in your work. In general, do you feel like writing has affected other parts of your life, whether positively like in my case or negatively?

Getting more playful about my writing has made me more playful in my approach to other things.

I’m not big on journaling, but if I go too long without writing, my mood suffers and my thinking gets cluttered.

Also, the progression of writing a novel slow and steady has helped me strengthen my capacity for progressing through big projects (writing and non-) without being paralyzed by the magnitude of the imagined whole.

I’ll also say that having done it proves that I’m capable, which is most of the battle.

So if anyone reading this is struggling with intimidation about the magnitude of writing A NOVEL (so many pages of so many words!), try to avoid doing the in-progress page count math, just focus on a tiny chunk every day or with whatever regularity you can, and you will eventually have a book-length thing staring back at you. And after you’ve done it once, the subsequent times don’t necessarily feel easier, but they do feel more possible.

Day of the Secret Writer

I Hear You...Reading

How It Begins

For more from Analog Stories, check out this Table of Contents.

You can always email me at rjr.analog.stories@gmail.com

Check out the ebook or print copy of my novella In the Wake of Dreams here.

Cheers,

-Ricky

Because my responses are too long, and I can’t leave the whole of them as a comment, I’m posting them down here:

1. I’ve been in the same position as you—a literary nobody with strange ideas that don’t seem to fit any mainstream mold. Combine this with an existential dread of wasting precious time, and you have a recipe for avoiding literary agents and the whole publishing industry, with its excruciatingly glacial pace. This was my thinking; I did a couple years of research, trying my best to convince myself that traditional publishing was worth it, until I stopped one day and realized that the mere fact of my trying to convince myself was proof enough that it was not the path for me. Especially once I found out that indie/self-publishing has been made easier than before, that you really can get professional level quality for a book, it was the beginning of the end for my traditional publishing attempt. And similar to you, In the Wake of Dreams was itself a trial-run for actually bringing an idea into the real world in the form of a book, and I’d say I was surprised at how simple it really was. Lots to decide and consider, of course, but it’s not a herculean task.

Your start on Substack sounds almost accidental, serendipitous. Mine was not really like that; in my usual mood of indecision that hovered over my subconscious’ knowledge of what I should really do, I did an excessive amount of research on Substack—listening to podcasts, reading up on actually running a Substack publication. I don’t remember the exact moment I decided for sure to start a Substack, I just knew in 2025 that I was going to finally do it and figure out what I didn’t know as I went along.

I do remember getting my ass beat by an ice dragon in the Mountaintops of the Giants in Elden Ring while I was listening to a podcast talking about writing on Substack, and as my attention wavered from the dragon I was slowly convincing myself that Substack was my way forwards.

I would mostly agree that Notes is a complete troll on fiction writers, but the flip side is that I feel like Substack has been following my essay “Fiction on Substack” and slowly incorporating my suggestions, sometimes exactly. It’s been strange to watch, but makes me hopeful that someone over there is trying to help us. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion, though, that Notes is too much of an addictive time-sink with little to offer but yet another online slot machine.

2. I totally agree with genuine engagement—it’s actually how I found and bought your book!

(Which I’ve been enjoying, by the way; at the time of writing, I’m about 1/3rd of the way through. I’ve been loving it because I studied psychosis quite intensively as my focus in my PhD, and I see so many of the main research findings on delusional thinking articulated so beautifully and simply in your story. It’s been really fascinating and, honestly, it’s also been giving me the occasional dopamine spritz that I still got it when it comes to my old, abandoned track of academia.)

I do worry about engagement in some regards; I’ve seen it devolve into a tit-for-tat kind of exchange—I subscribe to you, you subscribe to me—which inflates numbers but doesn’t actually correspond to any meaningful readership. A number of people here have had success in increasing their subscriber counts by hosting writing prompt challenges—usually with the requirement that subscribing to them is a prerequisite to submitting something for the challenge. Not judging, just observing.

I love your “cults of little fish”. I definitely feel that the Substack community has its own cliques and groups, which can be a great way to meet like-minded people, but I think Substack takes it too far. Sometimes I feel like I go weeks seeing the same 10 or so people on my timeline, and it’s not often that I’m shown much outside my little bubble.

But despite its problems, I love and mirror your optimism for Substack fiction long term. I mean, I think each note or post I make is a vote of confidence in this direction.

3. I also focus on writing things I like to read—a feeling that pairs well with reading as widely as your energy and time will allow. It’s a practice that is the pinnacle of the art form of writing for me. I think it’s what elevates writing from a hobby to a kind of spiritual credo. To me there’s no better form of complete, unhindered self-expression; the risks are very high, because for the words to mean anything you have to be vulnerable and honest, but the rewards can be more than high, more than priceless. The hard part, of course, is steeling yourself against the reality that, when you reveal yourself to the world, some of that world (maybe a lot of it) won’t understand, or worse, will outright hate you for it. But the need to realize an artistic dream is too forceful to care about the naysayers (at least, in the long run). The existential dread that creeps in around me when I haven’t written anything in a while is much, much worse, so much more unbearable, than even the harshest criticism I’ve gotten on here or elsewhere.

4. I also spent a ton of time, too much, tossing and turning ideas in my restless mind until I felt like I could finally sit down and write it. It’s the perennial writer’s dilemma that the artwork will never be as pristine and perfect as it appears in your head. Putting it out into the world in any form opens it up to imperfections, which are just like bacteria—no matter how hard you scrub, they’ll always be there, lurking.

For me, the longest period of indecisive “writing in my head” was all throughout graduate school. In my senior year of undergrad I got an idea of writing a novel in stories (I’m sort of writing it; it’s called Jeremy’s Journal) about a man with schizophrenia, what it’s like for him, how it affects his family, and how he deals with it—and those characters followed me throughout my studies from then on. On long walks where I was trying to relax after working on some research project, my mind would consistently wander back to Jeremy and his family. It’s funny looking back now, because I can’t interpret that as anything other than my unconscious (as the Jungians call it) yelling at me that I was wasting my time avoiding the thing I really wanted to be, which was a writer. I still let my mind chew on a story for a while before I write it down, but never for as long as in grad school, and I’m more practiced and have more courage for that bumpy transition from imagination to the page.

You and I are on the same page on the subconscious (or, unconscious, as I’ve been calling it). Don’t get me started or I won’t stop! I will say that the unconscious, and how it affects people who are working against it, plays a very prominent (or even central) role in my upcoming novel Ashes to the Sea. Lots of back-and-forth between dream sequences and decisions made in the “real world”. It’s reflective of what you say, the “training of the subconscious”; it’s important; my life drastically improved when I finally stopped and really listened to the symbols my unconscious threw at me.

I’ll have to push back a little on your point #2: in my experience, your brain does a fabulous job of presenting you a story idea that is within your grasp, just enough to stretch you in its difficulty but still be achievable, and that stretching effort will allow you to reach wider swaths of difficult stories. This has been my experience—another instance of listening to the unconscious, even when I’m nervous about it. I said once in a note that I know I have a good story idea when it keeps tapping me on the shoulder during my walks and the idea scares the shit out of me. If you can’t eject the idea from your day-to-day thinking, then you should prepare yourself for a fight, but know that you’re ready.

5. I have to say the same for me about Ashes to the Sea: it contradicted everything I thought my writing process would be. Printing the draft out was an instant game-changer, because it made revising and adding so much easier for me—an embracing of the analog way.

I’d say I’m a mix of a plotter and a pantser, leaning more on the plotter side. On especially difficult sections of a story or book, or even poems, I’ve found that an almost pedantic checklist of points to hit help me feel less overwhelmed tackling the problem. The pedantries of the list give great dopamine hits, because with how minute the list is, it’s easy to make any amount of progress—great for convincing your brain to continue with the hard thing it needs to do but fights or avoids.

I’m the exact same with music, but I don’t mind listening while editing. Editing usually has different music, a sort of compromise. Usually the music is best for imagining the scene on a walk, and like Pavlov’s dog, my brain salivates all the memories of that scene when I sit down to write it with that same music playing. I’m trying to use operant conditioning to my advantage!

6. Keep the secret to keep yourself invested—I’m starting to agree with this view. I’ve been practicing keeping my cards close to the chest (except, I’ve already failed; on an earlier question I revealed a novel I’ve been working on and haven’t announced yet!). I can’t pinpoint why, exactly, I’m becoming more secretive; the only thing I can think of is that the chase for validation of an idea (“Wow, I would love to read that novel!”) is too addictive, so ultimately distracting from actually accomplishing the thing. I’m trying to avoid the unconscious feeling of being done that comes from announcing an idea, when in fact the work hasn’t even started.

I think that’s brilliant: keeping it a secret means people only know about it when it’s finished. Like pulling back a spring as far back as you can before you let it go; my impulsive nature makes this almost torturous for me, but I’m getting better at it. Somewhat related, I think that’s the lesson I learned from this recent book launch. I think I confused everyone by releasing the ebook and print versions separately, which I only did because I was impatient in my manic excitement, and now I’m paying for it in people being confused. Ohh well, lesson learned—a trial run, as we’ve talked about.

8. I’m the same way with my wife. In my head, little devilish whispers convince me from time to time that she won’t love me anymore if she reads something of mine that she doesn’t like. Ridiculous, I know, and she’s insisted when I tell her that that would never happen. But I haven’t written anything she hasn’t like yet, so that’s still just a conjecture 😉. In many ways, I feel like showing her my writing in its early stages is more intimate and embarrassing than sex in a public park. So, I also only show her the best I can do at the moment, despite her grumbling at me that she wants to read as I write (“You won’t show your beautiful wife who loves you so much and just wants to support you?” Almost gets me every time.) So far so good—she really wants to read Ashes to the Sea, but… Hell no, not until it’s at least complete and has one round of my own editing.

9. I’ve also learned pretty much everything I know about writing on my own. I’ve taken a couple literature classes in high school and college that have helped in their own way, but I’ve never been in a creative writing class. And, honestly, based on what I’ve heard, I think that was for the best. I’m definitely one of those people who would have been overworked and demoralized by the way those classes work. I’ve mainly focused on honing my intuition, what feels right as I read and write, and using what I’ve read and liked as a kind of yard stick for that.

I’ve had a mixed experience with a writing group. The one I’m in now, we’ve recently gotten a couple new people and they come across as arrogant, preachy, and, in my own estimation, do not have nearly the level of chops to warrant their brow-beating and judgment. One in particular has been nothing but negative to just about everyone in the group (the best “critique” he gave me was picking one word and simply saying “I would never use that word”—thanks, so wonderfully riveting and insightful), and has a suffocating air of self-aggrandizement, and when I finally read something of his I just laughed and stopped caring about what he had to say. It’s sad because this group used to be very encouraging, and most of them still are, but it’s true about what they say that a few bad apples spoil the bunch. And you need to trust your gut when you get a weird feeling about a group. So I’ve been more recently wandering on my own.

Feedback can be more valuable than gold under the right circumstances, if it comes from the right people who have your best interest at heart. You have to learn how to avoid both extremes: people who will never be satisfied with what you write, no matter what you do, and people who will tell you you’re a genius even if you submitted a grocery list. (Various experiences in my life have led me to have no patience for the tough-love, rough-around-the-edges but well-meaning “I’m being an asshole to make you better” kind of mentor or critique partner.) I think the most underrated but extremely important skill you need to develop as a writer is learning how to discern good from bad feedback for what you’re trying to accomplish. Good feedback respects the individual nature of your project and works to help you get there, whereas bad feedback either only throws you into despair for the sadistic benefit of the critic, or even worse, completely derails your project until it’s no longer recognizable. In the latter two cases, feedback is nothing more than a baseball bat swing to the knees.

10. I also vacillate in the same way, but I’ve been slowly training myself to stay in the middle. But I think those violent swings of confidence are a normal working hazard of being a writer.

And you’re very welcome 😊

11. I feel the exact same way about what I consider a successful story. (I’m starting to think you’re not real, and that I in fact wrote these answers in an elaborate ploy, because you and I are on such similar wavelengths.) I’m always aiming towards some emotional effect, and all the pieces of the story contribute to that complicated feeling like a mosaic of details that come together when you step back. It reminds me of that Salvador Dali painting that looks like a portrait of Lincoln when you stand far enough away.

Those kinds of happy accidents that you mention are what make a book so great, in my opinion, and make it fun to write. It’s harder to tell when you’re reading another book, but there can still be the feeling that the author was having fun writing this section, and that’s a great feeling to have as either reader or writer. I can’t tell you how my mind burst with ideas of parallels once I put two-and-two together to treat my two main characters as foils to each other—when I didn’t know what to do with the one character, I paid more attention to what the other did, and decided that the first should do the opposite of the second. This pattern has done wonders for symbolism, plot, even sentence structure in some cases. Highly recommended if you can manage to conjure two foils in a story.

I totally understand the little secrets—I’m doing the same thing. Only a handful of people will understand some parts of my novel, but it’s true to what I want the story to do, so it stays.

13. “But I will always see the macaroni”—Yes, I agree with this. I think a writer can never really feel the magic of their own book because they have too intimate a knowledge of how the sausage got made. It demystifies the work, I think. The natural thing is to be so staggered by an end-result—a book you love—that it feels impossible that something so well done could have had hiccups or human difficulties along the way.

I agree with Dan Harmon—I feel like lots of a writer’s ennui—another periodic working hazard—comes from the clash of the ideal you’ve made in your head, based on your favorite works, and what’s actually staring at you from the page. Combine this with the macaroni idea, and you have a huge, possibly impassable block for writers, so that even if they’re told their work is genius, they’ll never really feel it (if they have human humility), because genius feels like it came out of the clear blue sky, and by virtue of having written the story yourself, you know damn well that the story didn’t come from the clear blue sky. That mysticism always escapes the writer, I’d say, and that missing ingredient leads to the ennui.

14. I touched on something similar in my response where I mentioned my work-in-progress, Jeremy’s Journal. I had to learn to not be so precious about the process, that the work had to get done one way or another. And I’ve come to see that I need pen and paper to really flesh out the idea anyway; the sentences don’t concretize or settle until they’re put down on paper.

I’ve also always wanted to write since I was a kid. It’s strange because it was always a mixed feeling of: of course I need to do this and will do this, on the one hand, and No, I’m not made for this, writing is for other people, for geniuses, on the other.

I did nothing related to creative writing in college, as I’ve said. I took a long, ten-year wander in the desert filling my brain with things that ultimately didn’t matter. I did not read a single novel, short story, or poem for those entire ten years. (I feel very behind on my reading as a result, and I think I’ll carry that insecurity to my grave.) Something about getting to college led me to abandon immediately any prospects of being a writer as impractical, and I had no idea about online writing and of course Substack didn’t even exist until I was half-way through graduate school.

I do feel that writers should have fun, it should feel like play. Not always, but a lot of the time.

I remember reading about Herman Melville, one of my literary heroes, when he said that going on his whaling ship was his Harvard and Yale. While people his age were stamping themselves with institutional approval, he went off to hunt whales. That was very comforting to read, as when I finished grad school I was completely lost and afraid of trying to reconnect with my long-abandoned loves, to what used to give me so much joy and meaning (and still do). Not just writing; I gave up the drums, as well, something just as crucial to my life, and I probably let go of a thousand things I could have done by focusing so much on grad school. But then I think about Melville and the feeling that I’ve wasted my life so far melts away.

15. I totally agree about ideas—execution does the heavy lifting. Some of the greatest stories ever have such a simple, almost dumb, central idea (Heart of Darkness is about a guy who travels into the Congo to see someone die, then he goes home), but it’s in the way that idea is uniquely expressed by the writer (Heart of Darkness is amazing) that captivates me, and I’d bet most readers. Trying too hard to have an original idea is paralyzing and no guarantee of a good story anyway.

Yes, I’m always open to the fact that the story can change, sometimes drastically, as you write it; imagine me making some pseudointellectual parallelism with observation changing quanta in a quantum mechanics experiment; writing is quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics is writing.

16. I’ve felt the same way about Substack—it’s a constant battle among writing my own things, keeping up with my friends here, finding new writers to read (thank God in heaven for Clancy Steadwell), the 1000+ books I’ve accumulated over the years that stare daggers at me whenever I scroll. (Another instance of the unconscious at work; I didn’t read but I collected novels I was interested in while in grad school, telling myself that one day I’d have time for them.) It’s a lot, too easily overwhelming, a lot more than I had anticipated when I started on Substack. I just accept that there’s a lot of good writing on here that I’ll never have the chance to read; but the flip side is that I want to give my full attention to the things I do have time and energy to get to. More selective, like you say.

And don’t worry, I still have about 3/4th of your novel to go at the time of writing this; I always tell people the stories will be there waiting for when you’re ready.

17. My mood also sours and the ennui becomes especially heavy and debilitating without a heathy dose of writing.

I have two novels I wrote in high school that will never see the light of day—lots of amateurish mistakes, awkward phrasing, teen angst, the whole shebang. But I keep them in a hidden place in my office (where my wife can’t find them) as a reminder to myself that I can finish a book, so I should keep going. I think pushing past this deep, self-sabotaging desire to break your toys and go home when it gets difficult is the perennial writer’s dilemma.

1. Mike smith!

2. Don’t worry about it; I’ve been slow on my own part!

3. I definitely did not haha! Breaks are important.