Life & Work with Janice Hardy

Hi Janice, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I’m an author and writing coach, who started out telling my stories, and ended up teaching others how to write.

Storytelling has always been a passion of mine, and I started young. As a child, I’d draw pictures and tell stories about the pictures, so my mother always said I was a writer before I could even write. I loved stories and the storytelling process and devoured them in any form I could—books, movies, TV shows, games. If it had a story, I was hooked.

Writing became a hobby (and a distraction if you asked my teachers!), and I started teaching myself how to write a “real novel.” It was my dream to be an author one day and see my books sitting beside my favorite novels on the shelves.

I read everything I could on how to write, and wrote my first novel at 12, though it wasn’t anything anyone but me would have wanted to read. I was deeply influence by Walter Farley’s “The Black Stallion” series, and though I didn’t know it at the time, it was certainly fan fiction.

Eventually, I graduated high school and had to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. I had two skills—writing and art. I figured I’d starve a lot faster as a writer than a designer, so I choose graphic design as a career. That served me well, and I enjoyed it for twenty years, but the author dream never left me. I kept writing and finally sold my middle-grade trilogy, “The Healing Wars,” to Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins in 2007. I don’t think my feet touched the ground for a week after that.

I always enjoyed writing, but the teaching side of my career came as a surprise. While I was writing my trilogy, a friend recommended me to teach an online class for Writer’s Digest, and I discovered I had a knack for it.

In 2008, I started a blog about writing called “The Other Side of the Story.” At that time, everyone said authors needed a blog, but I had no idea what to write about. Who wanted to know about boring old me? So, I wrote about what I loved—writing fiction.

After that, I started giving workshops at conferences across the country, which led to writing books about writing. To date, I have four novels published (The Healing Wars Trilogy for teens and the Grace Harper urban fantasy series for adults) and eight nonfiction books on writing.

I eventually rebranded the site to “Fiction University” and focused on helping my fellow writers improve their craft and careers. I also brought in guest authors every week to show that there’s no “right” way to write, and every writer has their own process and approach. Writing is a lonely business sometimes, and it’s helpful for writers to know they’re not alone in their struggles, as well as their journeys.

I’m proud to say that Fiction University celebrates its 14th anniversary in March 2023. It has over 3,000 articles on it now, which is just amazing to me. I’m in the process of redesigning it again to make it easier for writers to find the help they need, and the new site should launch later in 2023. I have so many plans after that, so I’ll have to see what all I can get done.

Getting published is a tough dream to chase, and I have a stack of rejection letters from those early days that did make me wonder if I had what it took to be a writer. But I kept writing and kept submitting and eventually wrote “The Shifter,” which turned out to be my big win and debut novel.

When things get tough and I’m struggling with my career or a manuscript, I read my saved fan mail, and it always picks me back up. Fan mail from young readers is one of the best things ever about writing for teens. Even after a decade, I still get emails from some of them, and one has published her own novel now. Those emails make all the bad days worth it.

One of the toughest aspects of my career is finding the balance between writing fiction and nonfiction. I essentially have three full-time jobs (including the blog), and there are days when I have to remind myself that I can’t do it all. Nobody can go full tilt all the time, but it’s not easy to remember that when I have a huge To-Do List staring at me. I know I’d get more accomplished if I stuck to one thing—fiction, nonfiction, or the blog—but I can’t give any of them up.

I think every job has ups and downs, and writing is no different. I’m doing my best to find the balance, embrace the aspects I enjoy, and minimize the parts I don’t as much as possible. I’m just fortunate to have a job I love, even if it has frustrating days.

I’m most known for my book, “Understanding Show, Don’t Tell (And Really Getting It).” I have so much fun tearing apart the writing process, and I discovered early on I have a skill for explaining it to others in a way that helps them finally “get it.”

The comment I hear the most often after one of my workshops is, “I struggled with this for so long, but you made it all so clear.” That always makes my day. I got into teaching to help writers, and seeing them excited about writing and learning something that helps them improve their books is an amazing feeling.

I’m also known for my writing examples, especially an ongoing one on my blog involving Bob and the Zombies. It’s a strange romantic triangle situation set in a zombie apocalypse. It’s silly, but it’s been useful to help show writers how writing works and explain what I’m teaching in that article. One of these days, I’ll have to write that novel!

When my husband and I moved to Sorrento, we started exploring the rest of Orlando. We’re working our way through all the amazing restaurants, too. There’s always something fun going on somewhere. Now, if only the traffic and parking just wasn’t so bad…(grin). We’d see a whole lot more!