All Faculty Profiles

Janet Flora

by Ilana Lang

When Gotham teacher Janet Flora writes, she can get so immersed she loses track of time. “I’ve spent days—the whole entire day!—writing,” she says. After a while though, she snaps out of it. “I have to get out of the house. I have to engage with the real world,” she confides.

The real world is not only a source of inspiration for Janet’s writing, but her salvation as a social creature. “I think writing can be very lonely,” she says. To balance this solitary experience, Janet seeks out ways to revive the “camaraderie” she relished in her time as a make-up artist on TV and movie sets, like during her fifteen years on the Today show.

One way she seeks out that sense of community has been to attend writing retreats. For Janet, these are gifts that keep on giving. She “met a woman there, also with an MFA, also teaching, also published,” and they’ve since “decided to share virtual writing time.” Janet explains that “it's not workshopping each other's work or even critiquing it. It's really about camaraderie… and showing up!”

Whether in-person or remote, the simple act of “showing up” is also a great way to sit down and do the work, according to Janet.

“A lot of writers procrastinate,” she says. The solution is none other than getting started. “Once I get started, I'm good.”

The destination is the journey, and Janet admits that beginning the process of writing is really only the first step. “Of course, some of those starts, I can say Wait, maybe that wasn't the best place to start. But any start for me is the action that enables me to get up the next day, or do it the next hour. It is getting started that ignites my progress.”

So, Janet finds herself starting no matter what, and she seizes any opportunity to avoid being confronted with writer’s block, even writing things down on the bulletin board in her kitchen. She does not lack ideas or material, but to ensure nothing gets lost in the fray of her daily life, she knows she has to stay focused.

“I have sometimes taken a little Post-It and put it at the edge of the laptop that says this piece is about…”

While Janet likes short forms of writing because they are “digestible” and the process of writing them is reassuring since “the end is in sight, no matter what,” she also appreciates the challenge that comes with longer projects, like the novel she is working on.

The test of this lengthier format resides in its unfamiliarity: “It’s something I haven’t done. It’s exciting!”

Janet likes to experiment with both fiction and nonfiction, too. The “real world” she frequented during her years in the entertainment industry propelled her to start a Substack “profiling people behind the camera,” and her novel-in-progress is about “three characters that have worked behind the scenes in show business.”

At the end of the day, if the “real world” is indispensable to Janet, even she has her limits—the last prospective writing project she tacked as a memo to the bulletin board in her kitchen was “I’m breaking up with 24-hour news.”