with Janice Hardy
Janice has a mission : To show writers ways to build a solid foundation for their writing. To provide tips and advice they could take right from these articles and apply directly to their work in progress. (To) give clear examples and advice on how …, so every writer could bring the story they wanted to write to life.
Janice Hardy is also the award-winning author of the teen fantasy trilogy The Healing Wars, including The Shifter, Blue Fire, and Darkfall from Balzer+Bray/Harper Collins.
She also writes the Grace Harper series for adults under the name, J.T. Hardy.
Find out more about Janice here.
Kat (00:14)
Welcome to the Pencils and Lipstick Podcast a weekly podcast for writers. Grab a cup of coffee, perhaps some paper and pen, and enjoy an interview with an author, a chat it with a writing tool creator, perhaps a conversation with an editor or other publishing experts. As well as Kat’s thoughts on writing in her own creative journey.You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. Well, hopefully not actually cry, but you will probably learn something. And I hope you’ll be inspired to write because as I always say, you have a story, you should write it down.
Kat (00:51)
This is Pencils and Lipstick. Welcome, everyone, to Pencils and Lipstick. I’m Kat Caldwell. Today is May 19, 2022, and we have a wonderful guest today. We always have a wonderful guest. You are like the best audience ever because everyone wants to come talk to you. So today we have Janice Hardy. She started Fiction University. She has a great blog, has so much information. She has a lot of really fun things to say. Also just to writers. You always have looking back, you have advice or things that you learned from whatever it is that you tried to do or are continuing to do. And so Janice, having been in the writing business for a while, she has some great pointers. One of my favorite things is how she gets through that muddy middle. So you’re going to have to stick around to listen to her advice on that. So today I had to close my window because the birds will not stop singing. They woke me up at like 5:10 today. Not that I was productive at all at 510, because I just sat there and went in and out of dreamland. I tried to get out of bed and I moved downstairs and with my back, it’s been difficult, especially in the morning, to get moving. And so I might sit in stretch or sort of like switch position, sort of walk a little bit. By the time my body has really warmed up and my brain has woken up, it is time to get the kids ready for school. And that is the story of my life. I’ve always been trying to be that person who would wake up early before everyone else. I like to be that person that’s up, but I would love to be able to get some exercise in before everyone else. If I have a class I need to go to that I’ve paid for, I will do it. Yeah. Otherwise, exercise happens later. And when you have pain and you are told to stop and you have to sort of move slower, then it’s a lot harder to get moving. But it’s okay. We’ll get there. By the time I get there, there will be another change in life. Whatever. It’s fine. Life is good. Birds are singing. It’s raining all the time here, but now it is sunny. So we’re going to get some writing done today. Somebody asked me a funny question. Just a question that I hadn’t thought about. Do you know what a book hangover is like when you read a really great book and you close it and you’re just like, no, I didn’t want that to end. Is there another book? And you can Google the author and did they write another book? And if it’s a standalone, you just think and it’s that space of reverie that you just want to sit in and you don’t want the bubble bursted by anybody. You just want to talk about the book or think about the book. That’s why book clubs are around, right? Because if you read a great book, you really want to delve into it. You want to talk about it. You want to share about it with other people, see what they thought about it. You just want to sit in that moment and you want to extend that moment as far as possible. This can happen to us also with television, a movie or a series like that, you don’t want it to end. You almost don’t want to watch the last episode because you know it will be done. That is what my daughter felt like with the Harry Potter series. She didn’t want to watch the last movie. Oh. But once I watch it, I’ll know everything, you know. So somebody asked me as a writer, do you get book hangover when you’re done writing a book? And it took me by surprise. When you get these questions that you haven’t really thought of, my first answer was like, no, just because you finished the draft doesn’t mean you’re done with it. You still have to edit it. You still have a lot of work ahead of you. You still get to spend time with that person. And that character really is what I’m saying. And I guess some people do, because that’s why they write series, so they want to stay with the character. And so I was like going on and on. Of course, this is during French class. I’m like trying to speak in French. No, I’m working through this question. And the truth is, if you like the character that you’re writing about, you do get book hangover. It’s great and satisfying to write the end. And yet sometimes you can walk away and you don’t feel like popping the champagne bottle. You almost feel like crying or I’m not a big crier. So it’s just like, oh, a funk. You miss your characters. You miss having to think about them, having to decide what comes next, having to discover something else about them, discovering this world that you’re creating. And now it’s over. And editing is definitely not the same. Not to say that sometimes editing, you have to completely change the scene or you have to add something in there, but it’s different. Like everything’s already pretty much created. The characters are created, the world is created. And I do think that’s probably why writers like writing in series. That’s probably why the fashion right now is to write a series because of those book hangovers. That’s why I’m going to write a sequel to Stepping Across the Desert. Not exactly a sequel, but Philip Dowser’s story, what happens to him? I can sort of bring back the other characters. I don’t have to create them. They’re already there. I do have to create his love interest. But that’s fine. I’m just asking, have you ever experienced this book hangover? I can imagine if you finish a series of four, five, sex, seven, or more series. I wonder if that book hangover is worse or if it’s okay. Like, are you coming down slowly? Like, you know that there’s this countdown and this is the last book. I know that we would then move into a full sense of accomplishment. Like, you’ve finished a book. It’s amazing, but it’s almost like the steps of grief, right? Everything has its steps. And sometimes this hangover process or this grief process is part of writing a book. You’re done with it, you’re done creating that character. So I just thought that was an interesting question and maybe something interesting for you to think about. What was your experience when you finished a book or a series or a short story? Are you sad about it? Like, have you tried to figure out a way to continue that because you want to delve back into that world? My book an Audience with The King, which is kind of a low fantasy book. I really love that world and I would love to get back into it. I just haven’t really figured out how to do that or how I would do that. I have lots of little ideas, but nothing that comes up as a full story yet. So just a question. And if you have a book that you’ve read that just really gave you book hangover, that is what I am looking for. I am looking for a book that will give me book hangover because I love that feeling. Although it’s a little sad. Like, oh, I finished the book, but I love the feeling that I just read a great story. I love that. I would love to hear about your book hangovers. I think my biggest one was Trinity. That was a great book that really stuck with me for a long time. And then Kirsten Hannah’s, what is that, the Nightingale? I think that one stuck with me too, in part because the ending was not what I expected it to be. I thought that was a great book hangover. So if you want to let me know about your book hangovers, you can follow me on Twitter @PencilsLipstick. And then I’ll know that you’re not a bot if you tell me what your book hangover is. If anyone follows Twitter these days, we’re all talking about who is a bot and who’s not a bot. Whatever. So tell me what your book hangover is and then I’ll know that you’re not a bot. Otherwise you can follow me on Instagram. So the podcast has an Instagram @pencilsandlipstick all spelled out just like Twitter. Or you can follow me and get to know what we’re doing over at the community and what I’m writing @katcaldwell.author, I’m also on Facebook. You kind of get the announcements over there, but I’m not very active. And you get the announcements on LinkedIn as well. So you can always find everything pencilsandlipstick.com, everything’s spelled out katcaldwell.com. And remember, it is still may we still have the community open. It was really fun. Today I got to talk with Carissa Andrews. If you don’t know her, she has a great podcast called Author Revolution. It’s a great podcast. She talks a lot about mindset, a lot about rapid release. She knows a lot of things I don’t know. And I love listening to people who know just a different aspect, a different angle of the industry about writing. She writes fantasy and Sci-Fi, so that’s fun. But I got to talk to her on her podcast, and she is coming on to Pencils and Lipsticks, so that is a fun exchange. I talked to her about the community and about what we’re doing and all the sprints that we do and the space that we have to ask questions and let people know what we’re doing and be held accountable. What are you going to do this week? I’m going to write two blog posts. Did you write your two blog posts? Usually I’m like no, can’t write your blog post so we keep each other accountable. How far are you in getting that story done? Didn’t you want to publish it? Now one of our writers, Madison Michaels, over the weekend, I think she got up in the contemporary romance gosh, she got up really high in the charts. I want to say, like number nine, she got really, really high up, which is so amazing. It’s great to have a spot wherenyou can just sort of brag on yourself and people will recognize the amount of work that went into getting there. We can always put that on Facebook and people will congratulate you, but they might not understand just the sweat and the tears that go into getting your book seen by people. So that is part of the community. And then it’s the experts that come in and talk about all the things that they know about and help us tweak our marketing and tweak our books and tweak our mindset and all these things. What has helped them, what didn’t help them, what they learned in this journey, part of that is the podcast. But in the community, you get to be there one on one with these experts. You get to ask them questions. I mean, you only get access to that if you’re part of the community. Those don’t go up on the podcast at all. They are just sort of this one time thing. You can access videos if you’re in the group, but got to be in the group. So I really encourage you as we all go back to work as summer comes, find a writing community that you connect with. It will help you keep your writing going. It will help you give focus to what needs to get done, whether a chapter or the book or the marketing or the sales or whatever needs to get done. It gives you a place to ask questions because there’s a lot of little details that go into publishing your book, even if you do it traditionally, and definitely if you do it independently. So I encourage you to find a community of writers. If you want to find out more about the creative writing community, you can find that over at katcaldwell.com Just at the top. Creative Writing Community is the name of the group and then you have the Creative Writing Sessions membership. If you just want a place to write, you can pay just for the Sprints and get access to 20 hours a week of Sprinting. If you don’t really want to be distracted by the marketing at all or the experts, you still get to be part of the slack and the sprints. So because of the Sprints, a lot of us are getting our books done, which is great. It’s a great way to build that daily writing habit. So please, before we get into the interview, would you share the podcast with anybody that you know who is a writer or enjoys listening to writers talk about writing authors, talking about authoring, if you would like, and subscribe it on whatever app it is that you use to listen to the podcast? If people prefer transcripts, you can find them over pencilsandlipstick.com, everything’s spelled out. You can find full transcripts there. No, we don’t have videos. Lots of people don’t want to be on video. But some of you have asked for videos. So I don’t know it’s being thought about. It is in the process of being thought about. But you can find the transcripts in the show notes. You can always find the links to the interviewee, their web page, sometimes their social media, if they have it, sometimes their books, if they have a book. So definitely check out the show notes. But please like and subscribe if you leave a review. That would be even more awesome. I love reading reviews, love seeing where people are from, where they’re listening from. And if you ever just want to get in contact with me, ask questions about the podcast or suggest somebody for the podcast. Probably the best place to do that is on Twitter @pencilslipstick, everything spelled out, and that is it. Let us go talk to Janice Hardy.
Kat (15:00)
Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of the teen fantasy The Healing. Her novels include The Shifter Blue Fire and Dark Fall from Blazer and Gray Harper Collins. The Shifter was chosen for the 2014 list of ten books all Young Georgians should read from the Georgia Center for the Book. It was also shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize 2011 and the Truman Award 2011. Janice is also the founder of Fiction University, a site dedicated to helping writers improve their craft. Her popular Foundations of Fiction series includes plotting your novel ideas and structure, a self-guided workshop for plotting a novel, the companion plotting your novel workbook, and the revising your novel first draft to finish draft series. Her Skill Builder series includes understanding Show Don’t Tell and really getting it, and understanding conflicts and what it really means, focusing on common problem areas for writers. You can find Janice at janicehardy.com and on Twitter @janice_hardy.
Kat (16:10)
All right, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Pencils and Lipstick podcast. Today I have with me Janice Hardy. You might have heard of her through Fiction University. I have heard of her through several different writers. So I’m very excited to have her on to talk about both her fiction and her non-fiction. Hello, Janice. How are you doing today?
Janice (16:29)
Hello there. I’m doing quite well. How are you? Good.
Kat (16:32)
We figured everything out. We’re settling in. And I am really interested about your writing journey, both in the fiction writing in the non-fiction. You are a middle what do you call it? Middle grade.
Janice (16:46)
Middle grade.
Kat (16:47)
Middle grade.
Janice (16:48)
I have one series in middle grade. I have one series that’s adult, and then I have my non-fiction. I have my fingers in a lot of things.
Kat (16:56)
So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and then we’ll get into how you became a writer.
Janice (17:01)
Well, I started out as a graphic designer. That’s what I went to school for when I was growing up. I had two skills. I could write and I could draw, but design and have a good creative eye. And I figured I would starve a lot faster as a writer as I was an artist. So when I went to school, I went to school for commercial art, which actually worked out really well. And then as I was, not growing up, but I was always working and doing things. I kept writing on the side because that was my dream. I had always wanted to be an author for a really long time. And eventually I kind of ended up writing more and more and eventually sold my novels and kind of went on this crazy, crazy journey. I think I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m pull back right there. Now I tend to do that. I do like to dabble. I can’t help it. Let’s see. I’m a Florida gal. I grew up in Florida. I moved away for about a decade up to the beautiful mountains in Georgia. And I missed that terribly. But I’m back in Florida in central Florida now. I’m about 45 minutes from Disney World. That’s always fun.
Kat (18:01)
You got the pass. You can go there.
Janice (18:03)
Yes. It’s always nice. I’m a big Disney fanatic. I’m a gamer. I love anything that has to do with stories. A big five fantasy geek. It’s just lots of fun. I guess it’s me in a nutshell.
Kat (18:16)
Yeah. It takes about a lifetime to visit Disney. Definitely have that pass.
Janice (18:23)
Oh, yeah. I love having all the theme parks.
Kat (18:25)
Plus that is really cool. So you have the sunshine. I think you’ve stolen it from DC area because we went back down to, like, winter temperatures here.
Janice (18:35)
I missed the winter temperature. I don’t like the 90s, I like the snow and the cold and that whole winter where you get to bundle up in sweaters and scarves and I love all that. It was so different. I mean, I grew up with sunshine and beaches, and I’m tired of paradise when people want to come down. And I’m like, oh, I don’t want sandy beaches and blue water and palm trees, like, give me mountains and trees with no leaves. I know that’s crazy. But you like what isn’t normal for you.
Kat (19:03)
That’s true. So you’re always going north as people go south, which is good. Then you can find a cabin in the woods and everyone else is on the beach.
Janice (19:11)
Exactly. I love that.
Kat (19:13)
It’s perfect. So you started out in middle grade for fiction, is that right?
Janice (19:19)
That’s correct. Actually, my debut novel, The Shifter, I actually wrote it as a young adult, and my protagonist, Naya was 17. And we went through it and then I got my agent and then we sold the trilogy. There’s three books, and they were just discussing it. And at that point, because we’re going back to about 2008, 2009 at this point. And at that point, YA had started to shift a little bit, and it was very gritty and it was very sexy and it was starting to turn into what it is now. It hadn’t quite gotten there yet, but it was starting to do that. And they were saying that the story was much more of an adventure. And the romance, there was a little bit of romance in it, but not much. And it wasn’t as that they felt that it was suited for more of a middle grade, a slightly younger reader. So then they do that and they wanted to make my protagonist twelve. And I was like, no, there’s no way that she can do what she does in this book. She does some pretty not terrible things, but she faces some really tough choices and she does things that are not quite so good and I’m like, there’s no way she can do that if she’s twelve. I just don’t think it’s unbelievable. So we kind of discussed it back and forth. My editor agreed. And we lowered the age to 15.
Kat (20:31)
Okay.
Janice (20:31)
Which then put the book in a strange category called upper middle grade. And for those who don’t know a middle grade is for your nine to twelve readers. Think late elementary school, early middle school. So like maybe fourth grade to 6th grade, and then you have high school, YA, which is 14 to 18, roughly. So basically high school.
Janice (20:51)
Okay.
Janice (20:52)
And then upper middle grade kind of straddles, that it’s 10 to 14. So you kind of get that a little bit. Like maybe 5th to 9th grade. So it’s for readers who the regular middle grade is a little too kid-like and they’re looking for something a little deeper and more complex, but they’re not quite ready to handle the grown-up type situations that you find in YA. So it’s actually a really good category. It’s just one. There’s no upper middle grade section in a bookstore or like on Amazon or anything. It doesn’t exist as an actual category. So a lot of people don’t know what it is unless you’re a writer and you write it.
Kat (21:26)
Okay.
Janice (21:26)
Then you know what it is.
Kat (21:27)
That seems like an easy fix. Like, make a page Amazon.
Janice (21:31)
I know because you think there’d be a lot of readers who are like, I have a 13 year old kid child and I don’t want them reading the older games because it’s too much. I don’t want them reading Hunger Games. Yeah. Because it’s a little too much. But I also don’t want them reading The Magic Treehouse because they’re beyond that. So there’s not much out there. There’s plenty out there.
Kat (21:54)
Right. It makes it easier for the parents. I mean, I have one right in the middle., right there. And she’s quite sophisticated in her reading, but she also has specific tastes, so it would make it easier to find that book for her. And yeah, I’ve heard quite a few parents talking about how they don’t want them yet reading Hunger Games or things like that. Or maybe they want to hold off on the romance. It depends on the parents. Come on, it’s a table in Barnes and Noble. You think that they could.
Janice (22:27)
They really should do that, even though they have the store set up, like here’s the kid stuff. And then there’s that YA section. It’s like just have a little spot between the two of them, like there’s upper middle grade. When you think about it, that’s kind of what it is. It’s like tween fiction. Okay. It’s for that in between, like your 12 to 14, you’re not quite a teen. You’re not quite a teen, but you’re still not a kid either.
Kat (22:52)
Yeah, it makes sense. Okay. If anyone from Amazon is listening. So that was around 2009 that you filled the book and the whole trilogy.
Janice (23:03)
I sold the whole trilogy, which was great, which was fun. Yeah. It was interesting because at the time, there were two publishers who were bidding on it, and one of them wanted that book as a standalone and then maybe a second book to be named later, and then the other one wanted all three of the trilogy because we offered it up, but it could have been a standalone book, but there was more for the story to go. If we could have sold it for a trilogy. Like, it wasn’t dependent on that. On the trilogy. It wasn’t one story broken into three pieces kind of thing. So it could have gone on, but it could have been just one book. And we went back and forth and publisher who won it with Balzer and Beret with Harper Collins. And she was like, well, it’s a trilogy. Of course I want all three books, so they bought all three.
Kat (23:42)
Nice. Did you have the other one started?
Janice (23:45)
No, not a clue. I had some general ideas. Yeah. I will never write a trilogy again unless I know what the whole story is going to be. I don’t even want to submit it until all three, at least a rough draft are done.
Kat (23:57)
Right.
Janice (23:58)
It was so tough writing that trilogy. I knew where the story was going, and I had a general sense, and I think I had maybe a one-page synopsis for the book two, and I had, like, a half a page synopsis for book three because I really didn’t know what was going on on that one. But that was enough at the time.
Kat (24:14)
Okay.
Janice (24:15)
It was a little bit of a struggle. There’s a reason I wrote book two five times.
Kat (24:20)
Five times?!
Janice (24:21)
Five times. I mean, rewrote it. There’s like one scene in the entire book that survived the entire draft, and they’re trying to save somebody on the docks, anybody who has read the book, but the person they’re trying to save changed almost every single time. I can’t even tell you right now, it’s been a decade since I’ve read it or wrote it. I can’t even tell you who they’re trying to save in that final scene. Like, I don’t remember what it was. Yeah. Because I wrote it so many times, and it was like I wrote it, and it’s like, this is garbage. And I would trash it, and I just start over on a blank file. Like, not even trying to establish it. It was just one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as an author. Writing the hardest project I think I was to write that. I finally got it done in the end, and I think in the middle of that, I was like three weeks from my deadline. And back then it was the Beijing flu. Remember that years ago. And I was sick as a dog in bed. I’m sitting here trying to do my editor, trying to do edits I think. I’m trying to finish the draft because if I don’t turn it in, we’re going to miss our deadline. This is how bad it is, because I’m over and I would write for a while, and then I would flop sideways and take a nap for 20 minutes, and then I would get up and I would write for a while, and then I was terrible, but I survived. And I did survive. And the book came out. Were you, like, hallucinating book at that point? I was having horrible book nightmares and just it was awful.
Kat (25:46)
Do you think maybe that’s how it was, I don’t know, back in the 50s when people would sell their books and I mean, you kind of read about these stories where the writer is obsessing because they have to write. That sounds horrendous what you went through. My goodness. Struggling with a book, even though maybe anyone who’s listening already has the thought sometimes you have the books in your head where they just come and you know, the whole story, but sometimes you just have that sort of inkling. Yeah, I kind of know, like you say, where it’s going to start writing? And it’s like, oh, I have no idea what I’m doing at all.
Janice (26:22)
Yeah.
Kat (26:24)
Oh, my gosh. Well, it got done. So you have the trilogy. Did you take a break at that point? Was it traumatic or did you enjoy.
Janice (26:36)
It was fun, we did a lot. And I had started on another book after that, which was a straight up YA Fantasy. And I had started writing it, and I thought writing Blue Fire was bad. But then this other book, I call it YA Fantasy, came along and I wrote it and then revised it and revised it. It just wasn’t quite working. There was something about it that wasn’t quite clicking. And this happens. And it’s funny. Not all my books go like, this Shifter was incredibly easy to write. I wrote it in like six months. It was three months of revisions. We turn it around, we sold it. That was easy. So I don’t want to give the impression that I struggled with every single book, but I have had a couple of books that I have struggled with a lot, and that’s why a fantasy one was one of them. And I struggled. And I worked on it for two and a half years and couldn’t make it wrong. And then finally I was like, no, this sucker. And it made me hate writing fiction. Actually, that’s when I switched over to non-fiction, because the thought of going to the keyboard and trying to write a novel just made me cringe. And I should have given up on it, like 18 months sooner. It was one of those things. It turned into a grudge match. And now I know if I’m struggling with a book like that, I’m like, no, it’s not ready to write. And I keep going back to that book because it’s a book I really believe in. And one of these days I’m going to get it right. But I have to be really careful about when I go back to it because it can suck me into that hole and I’ll make it work. And I know, I make it work. And I keep hoping whenever I get it out there, it’s going to be like a big breakout book. And that’ll be the one that I’m giving these inspirational keynote speeches to and tell all of these writers that are struggling. It’s like, look, this is what happened. It took me nine years to get this book written, and it will be very inspirational and everyone will be happy. This is my dream for this book. Probably won’t happen, but this is what keeps me going when I want to just rip it to shreds and, yes, throw it back in the drawer.
Kat (28:24)
I would think most writers have those books in the back. I love looking through my files. Yeah, it’s such a great premise. But what’s going to happen in that book Kat? Never mind. Put it away.
Janice (28:35)
Yeah, we all have that book of our heart kind of thing. So, yes, that’s why I switched over and I started writing non-fiction, and I wrote my first book, Plotting Your Novel Ideas and Structure, which is kind of like planning and developing. And like I want to write a book. I don’t know how what do I do? And it kind of takes you by the hand and leads you through and it talks, you know, it says plotting, and there’s a lot of plotting in there, but there’s also basic on some character development and figuring out what type of writer you are, what type of different structures and how to find ideas. It’s just kind of definitely for those writers who were like, what do I do next? Just need a little guidance. There’s lots of little things. So that happened to that. And once I got that done, I put that out for a while, and then I went back to fiction.
Kat (29:21)
So did you come to that? Was it pretty much what you learned through your process of selling the book and working with Editors and writing the book? I guess the second one. And is it just a really personal book or how did the non-fiction come about?
Janice (29:38)
Well, it came about in kind of an odd way, I kind of fell into non-fiction. Okay. Years ago, I actually wrote the first draft of The Shifter through an online writing group. Gloria Kempton, Writer Recharge, I think it was I don’t even know if Gloria is still doing it or not, but if she is take it, great class, and I had worked with her for a while and was doing a lot of draft stuff with her. And then later on Writers Digest, she worked with Writers Digest on their online school, and they needed an author to teach a Sci-Fi fantasy class online. And she was impressed with my critiques because we critiqued each other in the class, and she was very impressed with my critiques and my writing. And I think at that point I had sold the book, and she recommended me to teach one of her classes asked me if I could do that, and I thought that would be fun. So I did that and discovered I had a knack for teaching.
Kat (30:29)
Okay.
Janice (30:29)
Never would have known that totally out of the blue. But the way I would approach things and use the examples. And I wrote a lot of extra material because, right aside, just applied all the lectures and stuff. But I wrote a lot of extra lectures to fill in the blanks and fill in the holes for things that they didn’t explain. Because when I was writing, I got very frustrated when I was trying to learn something because I would read things like Show Don’t Tell, they tell you what to do. Use strong nouns and verbs, dramatized, do this. They tell you what you’re supposed to do. But nobody was actually sitting it down and breaking it down and making it obvious what you were supposed to do. How do I even find poll pros? How do I do it? I knew what I was supposed to do, but no idea for how I was supposed to do. So I went to a live studying and tore apart books and manuals and read every HowTo book on demand and started figuring this stuff out. And that’s what I brought to this class. And once I did, I was like, wow, this is a lot of fun and I did that for a while. And then I ended that and then shortly after I sold my first novel, that was back when blogging was still somewhat new. And everyone’s like, you have to have a blog. You have to have a blog. And I was nobody cares about me. No one wants to hear about my day to day life. What do I have to talk about? The only thing I had to talk about was writing.
Kat (31:45)
Okay.
Janice (31:46)
So I started blogging about writing. And then the blog grew and the blog grew. And then I thought I ended up writing the book. And it just turned out that I really enjoyed teaching writing and helping writers solve all of those problems and deal with all or avoid the frustrations that I had gone through. Because at that point, when I started sending my original query letters, they were query letters. I mean, it was all snail mail. I had to buy the big, giant, three inch thick writers market and go through with a highlighter. That’s how early it was. When I started submitting, this was really like pre-email dating myself. It’s terrible. But yeah, I was very young when I was doing all that. Right.
Kat (32:27)
Well, they didn’t want attachments. Remember how it was like before 2000, maybe even 2012-2013. Nobody wanted attachments because they were all afraid you’re going to send them some sort of spam or worm or virus.
Janice (32:41)
Definitely. And this is even like the late 1980,1990, right around 2000. Yeah, I was submitting very early. It was just printing out manuscripts and sending them in with your staisies and stuff and to send back. I mean, it was that crazy. But so I did the block and then I just said I really loved it. So then I just shifted over to the non-fiction for a while. Okay. And I was still writing fiction at the time and trying to go back and wrote a bunch of books that just they weren’t bad. The ideas were good, and I’ll probably do something with them at some point, but they just weren’t working. And then so I just kind of was focusing on non-fiction for a while because I was really having fun and enjoying it.
Kat (33:24)
Yeah.
Janice (33:24)
And I did that. And then we were growing Fiction University. I say, wait, my husband’s helped a lot. He’s a professional geek, his words. So he helped along with some of the technical stuff and setting things up. And he wrote a bunch of scripts and stuff and CSS and whatnot.
Kat (33:36)
Yeah, because it’s definitely not a blog now, I guess maybe if you call it. But I mean, it’s a full-fledged website with how many articles do you have? Like thousands.
Janice (33:45)
Over 3000 at this point. Yes. I’ve written probably 2000 of them. I have a lot of guest authors. I have a lot of guest authors because one of the things I like to philosophy that I firmly believe in is that there’s no right way to write. Everybody has their own process. Everybody has their own path to get there. They’re all guidelines. There’s no hard and fast rules for the most part. So I started bringing on guest authors to talk about how they wrote and talk about things like I am a hardcore outliner and plotter. I don’t pants at all. I would not have anything back in these days. I’m much better now because I learned a lot over the years, but I wouldn’t have a clue. Early in those early days, I would have no idea how to help the pantsers with their novel. I couldn’t give you any advice, but I knew a lot of pantser, so I brought them on the blog so that they could talk about pantsing and they could talk about their process to help writers who did things differently and bring in writers who maybe did. I have a friend of mine she writes out of order. She gets ideas for scenes, and then she writes them down in long hands in spiral notebooks. And then when she feels like she has enough, she puts it all together and she turns it into a novel. I break out in hives just thinking about that process. But she writes amazing books. Doing this process like this is what works for her. And it’s funny because I bring that up like it’s almost every workshop or event I ever do because somebody always asks, do you need to outline? Do you need to do this? And invariably there’s a couple of people who go, oh, my gosh, I do that. I thought I was the only one. So it’s nice to see what other writers do, because I think that’s very comforting to writers, especially if you’re a new writer, because you know that you’re not the only person. Sometimes you can feel very isolated and sometimes you can feel like, oh, my gosh, I’m the only person doing this. Am I doing something wrong?
Kat (35:33)
Right.
Janice (35:33)
You’re not doing something wrong. Whatever you’re doing, I’m sure there are other writers who are doing the same thing. And as long as it’s working for you, it’s working for you. Now, if it’s not working, then absolutely seek out and try new things and to find something that works better for you.
Kat (35:49)
I always suggest people to look into what other people do and brush up on your writing skills a little, maybe brush up on your grammar will save you money in the editing process.
Janice (36:00)
Absolutely.
Kat (36:01)
There’s nothing wrong with reading craft books. Like, I started probably a year and a half ago. I never did it before because why would you do that? I was like, why would I do this? I have too many diapers in this house at this point. I don’t have time to do that. But with especially the understanding of it’s just one person’s opinion on the craft. Right. Like on how they do it, what they’ve learned, the things that they’ve seen, the things that they’ve studied. But there are some things like you mentioned Show Don’t Tell. You’ll get that back from an editor. And sometimes I mean, I started out in early 2000s as well, sending out those pre stamped things so that they can send back the answer to the query that said no, thanks again, I paid for that. And you would sometimes get notes from the editor. So what are some things besides Show Don’t Tell? And maybe you could even explain that to us. They would just say these random things. I mean, I didn’t study writing in University, so I was like, I don’t even know what you’re saying. And then you could add some drama to it and they’d be like, too angsty. But I changed it.
Janice (37:08)
Yeah. It’s like, do you want this? Yes. And this is why I wrote my Show Don’t Tell book, because that frustrated me so much. And I sat down and really studied and tore it apart. Well, one of the things that I think that’s really tough about Show Don’t Tell is that there is no one hard and fast rule. If you’re writing, like, for example, go back to middle grade. If you’re writing middle grade third person, you tend to show a little bit more because a you’re using a third person often more of an admission narrator. And the further away you pull from your narrator, the more telling is acceptable because you do have an outside narrative narrator telling the story. And in middle grade, sometimes you have to tell a little bit more because you have very young readers who are still learning, and some of them are very literal. They’re still trying to figure out how this whole reading and book thing in life works. Sometimes you need to be a little bit more on the nose about stuff. You want to be subtle as well. But sometimes you need to spell things out a little bit if you’re doing a first person point of view for like an adult first person point of view, telling is much more noticeable because nobody sits there and they see this all the time and nobody you’re not going to get rejected if you do this. But it always makes me go when it’s like I brushed my long curly blonde hair or something, or actually, you wouldn’t brush curly hair, but I brushed my long blonde hair. Nobody thinks like that. Nobody does that. You’re not going to point out your own features. And of course you do that because you need to let the readers know what the color hair somebody is. But there are other ways you can do it. Comparing and contrasting. I always like to use that’s a trick that I like to do, but that’s one of those things. So depending on what you’re writing and who you’re writing for, that Show Don’t Tell is a sliding scale. Yeah. So it depends on where your narrative distance is.
Kat (39:02)
Okay.
Janice (39:02)
Your narrative distance is really close. Telling is very obvious, and you want to avoid it at all cost as much as possible, because anything you do is going to jump out and draw your reader out of your story. If you have a very distant narrative distance, the telling is going to feel more like storytelling and more like your mission narrator. And it’s going to be more acceptable to a point because the style fits so much better, especially if you’re doing something maybe more of a literary or something more of a thriller or something that’s a more distant, detached versus a close, character focused journey. Sure. So that’s just where you’re going. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really tough with writers is when you’re trying to figure that out because you’ll be getting advice and the advice doesn’t necessarily apply to what it is that you’re actually that you’re writing.
Kat (39:49)
Yes.
Janice (39:49)
And a lot of people don’t know that. I think one of the other problems with writing advice, especially people like me who give a lot of writing advice, is writing is its own language. Okay. Writing advice is its own language. If you’re new or you just have not encountered something before. A very common thing is character agency. The higher up, the more advanced you get, the more you’re going to start hearing about character agency. And we all talk about it like we all know what it is, and a lot of people don’t know what it is, especially if you’re new character agency, see, you’re a pro. If you’re an editor or publisher, if you really dig down into the people who actually work with text on that level and we know it because we teach it and we talk about it. But your average writer doesn’t. Even if they have books published, they might not even know about it. It’s that sense that your character has reasons for participating in the story. Their personal goals, their motivations are what’s driving the story. They’re not just an actor on a stage acting out the book. That sense that they’re making the story happen through their choices, and those choices matter to them.
Janice (41:02)
If you took that character out of the story, there would be no story. You can’t just replace them with another person. We’ll throw up Bob and we’ll grab Jane and we’ll throw her in there some stories, some stories you can. And if you do, that is a red flag that there is probably a problem with your story. Your protagonist should actually matter and be doing that.
Kat (41:21)
Right. And they call that agency agency. Interesting. Yeah, I call that a good character.
Janice (41:27)
A good character. Exactly. It is a good character. That’s just one example. There’s a lot of things. If somebody never heard a phrase or they don’t know something and they’d be like, okay, well, I’m not sure what it is, or maybe they do know what it is. Conflict is another reason. Again, this is why I wrote the conflict book. Conflict is one of those that has multiple definitions depending on context. You’re talking about the conflict, your external conflict, your core conflict of your novel. You’re talking about your individual scene conflict. You’re talking about your internal conflict. You’re talking about your character at conflict because character act conflict and internal conflict are not the same thing, even though they are very similar. Like, how are you referring to your conflict? So there’s a lot of different definitions. And if you’re trying to get information on external conflicts and somebody is telling you what you need to do for a character or conflict, you’re going to be completely lost.
Kat (42:24)
Right.
Janice (42:24)
And you’re just not going to communicate well. And you’re going to be like, but you’re going to have trouble plotting because you can’t plot with internal conflict. You need the external conflict in order to make those internal conflicts have meaning. And you need something external. Because when I always joke, the easiest example here is like, say your character, her goal is to find love. In a romance novel, I need to find love. We’ll go out and find love right now. You can’t do it. That might be her goal. I’m lonely. I’m unhappy. That’s my conflict. I need to overcome my shyness, overcome your shyness. You can’t plot with that because that’s a state of being. It’s not an action, but you can force yourself to go out and go out to bars and meet people. You can sign up for a dating service. You can ask your friends to set you up. You can start doing things that make you happy and run into people who also like those things. There are external things you can do which will allow those internal conflicts to work themselves out to store. So that’s kind of how that works together, which we’re talking about.But like I said, I love talking about writing. So I can get off on tangents really easily. But these are the types of things that are tough for writers, because if you don’t understand the language and the context, you can get very lost and very confused.
Kat (43:39)
Right. And I would assume that even conflict, that changes with genre. Right. You might not throw tons of conflict at an upper middle grade where you might have more conflict, all the layers of conflict in a thriller, I would assume a lot of times if they’re James Bond type, he doesn’t have internal conflict or so he just wants to die.
Janice (44:03)
Maybe. Yeah. And I use those examples all the time. I’m like with character arcs, they have internal conflicts because internal conflicts usually happen regardless. But like character arcs, that’s the one. The character conflict, Jack Reacher doesn’t grow and change. James Bond doesn’t grow and change like those characters are those characters. So again, it’s definitely depending on what genre you’re doing. Yeah. Romance has a very different conflict because you’re looking sometimes you have external antagonists, but most of the time it’s a person versus self-conflict and antagonist because it’s the two love interests and they have their own baggage and their own issues. And those are the things they have to overcome. Well, that’s a very different type of plotting than an external. We need to save the world. We need to stop the wizard. We need to catch the killer. I mean, those are very different conflicts, and you approach it in a completely different way.
Kat (44:59)
So do you think that’s why some people with plotting, maybe they have issues with plotting because maybe they’ve listened or read a whole different genre or somebody that absolutely looking at it from a different point of view and then you’re like, but I don’t know, they’re the biggest external thing is she goes to a bar.
Janice (45:17)
Yeah, exactly. Well, I do. I think that’s tough. And this goes back to that writing advice thing is that I love outlines. I love structure. I think all writers can benefit from it. But not all structures are the same.
Kat (45:32)
Okay.
Janice (45:32)
And one of the big things, especially back when Star Wars was coming out and everything and Campbell put out that hero’s journey, hero’s journey is the main way, and everybody was writing stories for the hero’s journey. Well, the hero’s journey is the worst possible structure you can use for a romance, because the whole point of the hero’s journey is that he ends up he or she makes a sacrifice and they end up alone at the end. A romance is all about getting two people together at the end. It is the worst structure. So if you’re trying to plot a romance novel or anything that has a romance where your characters are getting together and you’re trying to use the hero’s journey, you’re going to end up running into problems because the beats and the structure in that structure are completely contradictory to what you’re trying to tell with your story.
Kat (46:19)
And I would even argue, I know everyone uses Star Wars all the time, but Star Wars, they’re working together all the time in Han Solo and what’s her name? Leia.
Janice (46:28)
Yeah.
Kat (46:32)
They’re not James Bond. I really think James Bond is a guy that goes against he’s always the lone wolf. I’ve read all the books, so I see their point on some. But again, sometimes you leave the craft book, you set it down. You’re like, it made sense while I was reading it. And now that I’m trying to apply it, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense.
Janice (47:00)
Yeah, exactly. And it’s fun. I’m pulling things from different I have my own structure that I use and I pull things from because Blake Snyder has to save the cat, which is great. It’s wonderful. But again, it’s set for some very particular things. But he has his middle section, which he calls the promise of the premise for the middle. And I love that because he talks about how that’s the reason somebody picked up went to see the movie because it is a screenwriting, even though they haven’t adapted to novel. But that’s the reason people picked up that book, went to see the story. And like he uses, one of the great examples is Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock. Sandra Bullock. You go to that movie because you want to see the hard nose FBI agent turned into the beauty queen. And that’s the whole middle with their physically doing that and she’s interacting and she’s trying to get along with the other contestants. And that’s the fun. That’s the promise of the premise. And I love that in the middle because the middle of a novel is 50% of your book. That’s where all the story is. The beginning sets up the story and sets up all the characters and establishes all of your issues and problems. The ending resolves all of your issues and problems. But the middle is where the plot happens. Interesting, which is why plotting is hard. So if you think about the middle as being the promise and the premise, that’s great because you’re like, these are all the fun moments and all the exciting things that my readers picked up the book to get.
Kat (48:20)
Okay.
Janice (48:20)
So I love that concept. I may not have it structured the same way he does, but I like the idea of that. So I like thinking about the middle as the promise of the premise. So, like, there’s different things that I pull. And I like Michael Hay has wonderful he’s great for character arcs and romance because he has a very with a six stage plotting structure. I think it is it’s very character based, and he does a lot for romances and romantic comedy. So it’s very heavy on the character art and the relationship. And that’s a really nice structure for those kind of books. And there are elements of his structure that I like that I go, oh, they’re doing kind of a character thing here, or if you’re doing more of a group or an ensemble cast. Well, the heroines journey is great for that because that’s all about characters reuniting their families or reuniting society. It’s about coming together. So there’s no one structure, more or less, except for the basic three act structure, because almost beginning, middle ending, no matter what you do on those three, your three act is essentially beginning middle ending, which is American storytelling.
Janice (49:20)
So that’s kind of what we do on that. So that’s a lot of fun. So you can kind of pull whatever structure you need to whatever story you need, and it can change so you don’t have to be married to one, right? Yes.
Kat (49:32)
I think that that’s an important point to say, especially not just beginning writers, but maybe writers who have a few books and maybe they’re struggling because the way of plotting or planning it just isn’t working for that book. And it’s okay to realize that maybe they need to switch it up. But I really like that promise of the premise, because the middle is usually the place where writers find themselves stuck. Now I have to get them out of this issue. And why are they doing this anyway?
Janice (50:02)
They do, I have a little trick for that. And this is what helped me back when I was struggling with my middle is I do something called I call the midpoint reversal. And almost every structure has a midpoint something in their case, no matter what you have. But I like it right in the middle of the book. And it can be a chapter off, doesn’t have to be exactly. But I like to do a midpoint reversal, which is something happens that shakes up the story and changes the way the characters and the readers see the story and send them kind of a story in a new direction, because that turns your middle into two 25% chunks. And the first half of the middle is all about working towards whatever goals, whatever they’re trying to do is to work towards that middle event. And then that middle event shakes things up and things happen and change, and it could be discovery, it could be whatever it is. And then the second half is them recovering and dealing with the ramifications of whatever that is, which causes that slow dissent where things start happening, the antagonist gets the upper hand and it flows with that second half where you get to the end of act two, which you traditionally have your dark moments, your Allah’s lost moments right before the climax. And having that moment makes it easier because it breaks it into a smaller chunk and it gives you some place to go and then some place to recover from. Because you have points. You kind of have that arc. You have the beginning of the middle, the middle of the middle, the end of the middle, and you know where they start and you know where they end up. And then you have that middle point that helps them transition into going into that ending. And it makes it a lot easier than that. Middles became a breeze easier.
Kat (51:38)
And I can see how plotting you would need to plot that basically because I don’t know how you would pants that out. I’m not sure how much do you say that you plot, but how much do you know? Do you know all three of those points before you start writing?
Janice (51:53)
Oh, absolutely.
Kat (51:54)
How much time do you spend plotting and deciding?
Janice (51:57)
I’ll probably spend a good month developing the story and the plot and the characters before I ever put paper to pen. There’s plenty of things I don’t know. When I wrote the Shifter, the only thing I knew about the ending was that she defeats the bad guy using her special power. That’s a given. I didn’t know what it was. But then as I get closer and I update my outlines and I update my outlines, I usually start with about a five or six point outline. I like to know my opening scene. I can’t write a book until I have my opening scene done. I need a good first line. I need my opening scene until I have that figured out again. It took me a month to figure out the opening line for the Shifter, which is stealing eggs is a lot harder than stealing the whole chicken. That’s the opening line. So it took me about a month to get that opening line and then being done right, and then the rest of it was brief.
Kat (52:44)
Okay.
Janice (52:44)
But I like to know the opening scene, the inciting event. I like to know the midpoint. I like to know the ending and the ending. Yeah, those are those five. I have more. I have nine total, which is my personal thing. But those are like those five points that I like to know, even if they’re rough, because those are enough to give me an idea. I know how it starts. I know what happens to get my characters onto the plot path. I know what the shake up is in the middle, and then I know how they’re supposed to end.
Kat (53:13)
And how do you come to those points? Is that what you’re thinking? Is it writing it out?
Janice (53:18)
I kind of brainstorm. I’ll make a lot of notes. I’ll talk with my writer friends, and it depends on which direction. Sometimes an idea will come and it’ll be like, oh, well, this is a story about X, Y, or Z. Like, you have an idea. This is a story about a spy novel, and I know that it’s going to end with an assassination, that kind of thing. And then if I know it’s going to end with an assassination, then I work backwards. How does my protagonist get into it? What are the things? What’s going to surprise characters? And sometimes I don’t always know the midpoint. I try to know the midpoint. Sometimes I’m iffy on it or it might be like, well, what’s the surprise? What’s the big shock? Sometimes there’s a big shock in the story what’s going to surprise readers? And I try I usually throw that at the midpoint. Now, it may not stay in the midpoint as I write the book. That makes sure it does, but at least I have a direction. I will update my outline all through my writing process when things change, not only does it not stick me in there, because sometimes if you have an outline, one of the dangers is going, well, this is my outline. And sometimes when you’re writing, the better ideas come up. I mean, for me, a lot of times is my first brainstorming that’s when I’m getting all of my first ideas down on paper. And then as I write and as I develop it, I get better ideas and better ideas.
Kat (54:35)
And do you do that with another person, or do you do it?
Janice (54:38)
Just do it with me. But I have a couple of critic groups and a lot of good all my friends are writers, and we’ll sit down and then we’ll discuss things. One of my best friends, she’s a writer, and in the mornings we go on walks together, but she lives in another city, so we have earbuds and we talk as we’re walking. And it’s always also what we’ll be working on today. And we talk through our scenes. We talk through. We talk through what we’re struggling with, and we hash things out back and forth, which is incredibly helpful because we just need to say things out loud. Once you articulate them, then you can clarify what it is you mean it’s that nebulous. I know what’s going to happen, and I think I know specifically what it is. But then when you actually try to write it or do it, you realize, no, I don’t have it.
Kat (55:23)
Yes, I believe in that, like talking it out, even if you don’t end up sitting down like you say, and doing exactly what you claimed you were going to do on your walk, if that happens too. But somehow it helps. It’s not just you thinking about it. It’s like, oh, I have really the whole scene in my head, especially with a book that you’re not. You don’t have the whole thing in your head. And like we’ve said before, some books come pretty quickly and some books are just an idea. And you kind of need that seed to sit in the dirt for a minute and you just need to be like, okay, how am I going to make this a good book? And I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as a new writer is to sit down the minute that you have the idea and think that a book is just going to come out. Because like you sort of said with conflict and with Show Don’t Tell that there are some rules about storytelling that readers know inherently that they’re going to understand. If that character can be pulled out and switched out with somebody else, they’re going to be like, I don’t know something about this book, and they’re going to put it down and you’re never really going to know, why didn’t it work for my readers?And here I go. I’m not sure where I was going with that, but I like your morning box. I like this idea. So what happened with Fiction University? It went from a blog to this huge.
Janice (56:45)
Janice Hardy blog. Actually, The Other Side of the Story was what the original name was, because I was telling The Other Side of the Way I thought was terribly clever. When we came up with that back in 2008, I guess it was. So we started doing that. And after about two or three years, I noticed that the posts that were getting the most attention and things people were asking me about and talking to me, and I had started at the run around that part. I started doing a lot of writing workshops, and I started teaching writing and going out and doing those. And I realized that this was my niche, like writing, education and helping. So we decided and this is my husband and I again, we decided that we were just going to revamp it and rebrand it and call it Fiction University.
Kat (57:25)
I like it,
Janice (57:26)
Which was a lot of fun, and that’s what we did. And once we did that and started having and then I had a focus and I knew what I wanted to do with it and the direction. And then I started going, okay, how can we shape some of these posts? Instead of being more like musing or philosophical talking about writing? Let’s get more into the how to. Here are some tools, and I try very hard, both with the blog and with all of my writing books. It’s like, here are tools that might help you or that can help you use the tools that work for you. Don’t use the tools that don’t work for you. Here are different options, and I try to give multiple options for everything that I do.
Kat (58:01)
Nice.
Janice (58:01)
Because again, people have different needs. There’s different things. Some things click with one writer, some things click with different writers. Sometimes you need to have something approached in a slightly different way. I try to use a lot of examples. I found that that helps writers a lot. And they can see actual physical examples. I love dissecting text and dissecting a topic kind of thing. There’s a show on television I can’t remember conflict at this point. I think it’s the conflict book. There’s like a very short chapter that kind of analyzes how conflict works and how things escalate and everything. That’s my favorite part of the whole book, just because it’s kind of hysterical, this whole thing with this wizard and like this evil wizard coming to aid the land of why they’re doing it. And it’s kind of done almost in the script format, and it’s just really funny and it’s very helpful. And I’ve had lots of people be like, oh, my gosh, that was my favorite part of the book, too. It makes so much sense when you played it all out like that. And so it’s fun. And I like doing that and digging into it and showing the different things because it’s about understanding why we do things.
Kat (59:02)
Yeah.
Janice (59:03)
There’s a funny little story that I heard years ago, and again, I tell this so often. So if you’re hearing this now and you’ve seen me a workshop, you’re probably going to hear this story again. We call it the ham story. And there was this little girl who was watching her mom cook dinner, and her mom cuts the end off the ham and puts it in the pan. She said, well, Mommy, why do you cut off the ham before you put it in there? She’s like, I don’t know. That’s something my mother always did. Well, let’s call Grandma and ask her. So they call Grandma and they say, mom, why do you cut off the end of the ham before you put it in the pan? She says, I don’t know. My mother always used to do that. Let’s call her and find out. So they called great-grandma and say, why do you cut off the end of the ham? She says, My pot was too short. So it’s a fun story because it shows that there are things that we do because we were told to do them that way and we have no idea why we do it.
Janice (59:57)
Yes. And with writing, if you’re doing something because someone told you, never use adverbs, always do this. Don’t start here. If you’re doing it because you were given instructions, but you don’t understand why that instruction works the way it’s supposed to. If you don’t understand how it works and then you can run into problems or you won’t be able to use the tools as well as you could if you understand how they work. So my philosophy with writing is understand how writing works, understand the tools and how they work so that you can use whatever tools you need to use to achieve whatever it is you’re trying to achieve in your writing. So that’s kind of my philosophy.
Kat (01:00:36)
Yes. Most people’s last class on writing was 8th grade, maybe sophomore year, high school. It was whatever that teacher wanted to read.
Janice (01:00:47)
Yeah. And it’s very different types of writing, too.
Kat (01:00:49)
Yes. Write a short story and you’re just like at 14 trying to struggle just because you want a grade. Yeah. And then pretty much I would say just for me, it was reading and reading and reading and wanting to write a story and just pretty much trying to piece things together for the first book. And like, I’m pretty sure this works. And I think what happens a lot of times is it might work for the first few. And then when you want to write a different story and if you don’t know how to use the tools, you find yourself in this corner where you’re like, well, I don’t know how to move it. I think it’s more like, why is this not working? It’s like that feeling.
Janice (01:01:29)
If it works, you’re fine. And I think a lot of writers because we read so much, we inherently know how a story should be structured and how things work because you recognize good writing when you read it. So you’ve got that sense. And when you get it right in your draft, then you’re like, yeah, this works. I’m a great writer. But when you get it wrong, which you’re going to get it wrong, we all do. When you get it wrong, you have no idea what to do to fix it because you don’t know what it is you did to get it right.
Kat (01:01:57)
Yes.
Janice (01:01:58)
So it’s like I’ve known writers who would write first drafts or write drafts, and they either worked or they didn’t. If they didn’t work, they just throw them aside and go on to the next one because they were incapable of revising, because they didn’t understand why their story worked or why their story didn’t work. They just had a natural enough talent to get it 30% of the time or 50% of the time or whatever. And then once they started actually learning, then they started nailing those stories and they were able to revise those stories to turn them into something worth reading when before they would just toss them aside because they had no idea how to fix them.
Kat (01:02:33)
Yes. Oh, my goodness. I like that. I like being able to know how to revise because I do think that this happens quite often. And I think then we get that sort of imposter syndrome. And maybe I shouldn’t be writing it mentally just for our mental health. We should know how to revise it and write the story. It’s in your head for a reason. You got a full draft. So I know on fictionuniversity.com you have first drafts, your vision, editing, your word choice, you have your non-fiction books as well. I wanted to talk to you about your other pen name, and we’ve gone over time. You also have another pen name that you write with adult books. Why did you decide to have a pen name for your fiction?
Janice (01:03:22)
Well, I did because I write for kids and I’m writing in my adult work. I have an urban fantasy out under JT hardy and I will have hopefully next year I’ll have the science fiction Detective series that I’m going to be starting, which will be fun. And those are all for grown ups. And in my urban fantasy, Blood Ties, one of the characters is an ex-marine and she drops a lot of F bombs. And my twelve year old readers probably shouldn’t be reading that. I’ll get daily letters from parents. So I wanted to set something up that was still me, still Hardy, but was just slightly different enough that my children readers, my younger readers would not automatically go there. They may not be looking for them kind of thing. So I set that up. And also this was a story that was my husband’s idea. And so he helped with the world building and we did a lot of discussing and playing things and I wanted to give him a little nod. And his name is Thomas. He’s Tom. So the JT is actually for Janice and Tom Hardy. And so he’s been doing more and more. And again, the detective thing is his idea. He’s promise boy, I couldn’t rent him out at writer’s page because he has ideas. He’s constantly coming in here going, what if he’s great with ideas? And so with the Sci-fi, it’s much more technical and a lot of computer oriented stuff. He’s a computer geek, so he’s been involved much more in the development of the Sci-fi series. Well, that’s huge. I wanted to include him in that. Even though he doesn’t do the writing aspect, he does a lot of the development aspect with me.
Kat (01:04:52)
Well, that’s fun. Yeah. So definitely I think it’s something to think of if you are writing two different age groups to possibly create a pen name. Right. A lot of people, different genres.
Janice (01:05:05)
You can. It kind of depends if your readership is completely different, then you want to do that. Because what you don’t want to have is say you write sweet, clean romances and then you put out a really hard hitting urban fantasy with a lot of sex. Those two readers probably aren’t the same. And if one of them picks up the other, you’re going to get a bad review because it’s not the book that they’re looking to read. And those bad reviews. And even with on the algorithms, with Amazon, they judge like, well, who’s reading your book? And if you have a lot of sweet, clean romance people looking over at your hardcore sexy urban fantasy, it’s going to skew your algorithm because those people don’t buy this book. So if they trigger that, this should be marketed to those people, they’re going to be very unhappy. So there’s a whole business and Amazon algorithm thing that goes behind pen names, too. Besides just keeping it separate, some people just want to keep your name separate because if you’re writing erotica and you teach kindergarten, you may not want your you may want to keep that separate, that kind of thing. But a lot of times if you’ve got completely different readerships you want to have pen names, that way you’re not going to muddy the pool with each of them.
Kat (01:06:18)
Okay.
Janice (01:06:19)
And you may have some place somewhere going. Well, I also write under this name. If you like this type of book, you can also go for this type of book. So sometimes people have different pen names and all your readers know all your different pen names. And sometimes people have pen names and nobody knows somebody is different from pen name because you want to keep that separate.
Kat (01:06:37)
You want to keep it under wraps.
Janice (01:06:38)
Yeah.
Kat (01:06:39)
That’s awesome.
Janice (01:06:40)
So there are multiple reasons.
Kat (01:06:42)
I will have your links in the show notes. If people want to find Janice Hardy or JT. Hardy or you write non-fiction under Janice Hardy.
Janice (01:06:51)
Under Janice Hardy. Yeah. All right. All the Fiction University and all of that is under me.
Kat (01:06:56)
And can they sign up for a newsletter?
Janice (01:07:00)
Blog post, tons of blog posts. I do have the newsletter which you can sign up for. And it goes out once a month. And it is mostly it’s like writing tips and writing craft and this. And usually there’s any four to six different articles and it’s a newsletter and you get a little update of what am I doing? But most of it is like more writing tips and more writing stuff.
Kat (01:07:24)
Awesome. Well, very good. We will have people go there to find you and find out more about you, Janice, and the Fiction University. I do like your newsletter. I find it very helpful. And it’s not every day I like that as well.
Janice (01:07:38)
No, once a month usually. And there are times when things are getting busy and that happens. Sometimes I do skip a month here and there, but I try to do monthly.
Kat (01:07:49)
Excellent. Thank you so much, Dennis, for coming onto the pencils and lipstick.
Janice (01:07:53)
Well, thank you for having me. This has been fun.
Kat (01:08:09)
Hey, you’re still listening? Since you are, could you do me a favor and head over to the app that you’re listening to this episode on and hit the subscribe button and then rate and review the show. It would really help the Pencil Olympic podcast get out into the world. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, well, then there might be more people out there who would enjoy it as well. If you want to find out more about me, you can head over to katcaldwell.com. I have my story over there, my books, my interactive journals, my one on one coaching information and information on my Creative Writing Community Membership group if you’re looking to write a book or you are a writer and you just want to find out more about how to write, how to publish, how to format, how to market and all the things that go into being an author these days, check out the membership grid group. There is a 14-day free trial that you can try it out, get into the masterminds, find out all the goodies that we are talking about in the group. I would love to see you there.