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Featured Writer on Wellness: Deborah Lincoln

ON: DECEMBER 15, 2021

How can anyone—a bureaucrat, a librarian, a gardener, a writer—be both so undisciplined and so anal?

Contradiction is, I suppose, a necessary element in writing fiction. It can lead to tension in the plot, conflict among the characters, doubts and fears in the protagonist.

Probably not so helpful when the author herself is riddled with them.

But contradiction is a fact of life. So are procrastination, self-doubt, lack of motivation . . . all of which are elements of the witches’ brew I deal with as a writer.

Procrastination May Be My Biggest Stumbling Block

Procrastination may be the biggest stumbling block.

It took me a week to tackle this task for Writing and Wellness. And I have four other writing projects waiting on the back burner, including my next book.

It’s easier to say, “The last book has just been released (well, four months ago is just, right?) and I get to take a break.”

Well, no.

Don’t Take a Break—Keep at It!

Jumping to another topic we touch on here—Advice to a Young Person Who Wants to Be a Writer: DON’T take a break. Keep at it. Daily, if you can. Five minutes, an hour.

On the computer, with pen-and-ink, talking into a recorder. There’s a line in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth comments to Darcy about her own mediocre piano-playing: “. . . but then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I would not take the trouble of practising.”

That comment teases me every time I procrastinate.

My Cure for Procrastination—Find a Passage in a Book You Admire And…

The only cure I’ve found for that—besides self-discipline, which is in short supply—is to find a passage in a book I admire and would like to emulate and type it out.

I put the passage from some brilliant author in one column, then in the second column I begin to write my own scene, using the rhythm and a similar event to carry forward my story.

That, of course, can easily lead to plagiarism, but I find that my own story takes over fairly quickly and my own words and constructions and characters go off on their own merry way and soon bear no resemblance to the words of the original brilliant author.

And since the final editing process is usually six or ten drafts down the road, plagiarism doesn’t raise its ugly head. (There was, several years ago, a news item about a young author charged with plagiarism. “I was learning my craft,” he said. I understood.)

My Solution to Writing-Inspired Arm, Back, and Leg Pain

Physically, my problem is arm pain (and back pain and knee pain and eye strain).

But my arm: I have lymph edema, which is a result of radiation treatments many years ago for breast cancer (long gone; no problem now) which affected the lymph system in my right arm and makes it swell.

I’m forced to baby it as if it weren’t a part of me, but a vulnerable little being that needs to be coddled. It hurts when I type too much, but even more if I write by hand.

The solution is to take breaks, do stretches, wear a pressure sleeve. And get a massage, which of necessity must include legs and back and pure heavenly all-over goodness.

I Couldn’t Bear For the Story to be Lost

Historical fiction is my genre because there are so many ready-made plots skulking deep in my family tree.

I started with my twice-great grandparents’ story, an astonishing tale of war (American Civil) and courage and adventure—all true—that just needed a little embellishing and appropriate dialog to bring to life.

I couldn’t bear for the story to be lost, for those gutsy folks to be forgotten. And their story suggested others, maybe not built so much on what really happened, but plausible. And fun. And a way to honor my ancestors.

Also, I love to build worlds that are evocative, atmospheric, that raise sleeping memories of our long-ago pasts—how we lived once, how we managed to survive through the generations. I love to see parallels between our history and our present: how we either solved or should have solved the same problems that plague us now.

When I first read The Scarlet Letter, I was captivated by the idea that within a very few miles of the new world’s coastline stretched a dense and primeval forest (Hawthorne’s lovely descriptions) and I imagined myself an eagle flying over that forest that stretched forever, untouched. I wanted so much to see it, know it the way it was then and would never be again.

So I take my imagination back, not so far as the sixteen hundreds, but back when there were still wild places. And I try to build that world so others see it, too.

I Feel Like I Need to Learn to Write All Over Again

Why I keep writing. I think I have to.

My first book was (relatively) easy, if you can call 20 years, dozens of rejections and a painful process of realizing I needed to learn to write easy.

My second book was much more painful. I didn’t always like it—I often hated it. I didn’t trust it to turn out well, didn’t trust my process, didn’t trust myself. But after the writing was done, and this happened with both my books, I didn’t remember how it happened, how it came about that words ended up on paper.

So when I think of getting into my next project (which I started ten years ago or so) I feel like I need to start from scratch, learning how to write all over again. But the characters are out there wanting to be heard and I can’t desert them.

Word of Mouth Seems to Be the Only Helpful Marketing Technique

Marketing in the age of Covid is tough. I don’t know that I’ve found anything that’s very successful.

My first book sold close to three thousand copies; I did a lot of personal appearances (book fairs, talks), entered contests, did some social media.

My second book—who knows how it’s selling? That’s the most difficult thing about marketing: it’s almost impossible to know what has an impact. I’ve done only one personal appearance, a Zoom video that’s floating around out there, and have tackled Instagram (and learned how to post simultaneously on Twitter and Facebook).

I’ve spruced up my website and begged shamelessly for reviews. Giveaways don’t seem to be working; we (my publisher and I) gave away a couple dozen books on Library Thing and Goodreads and I can’t tell that I’ve had more than one or two reviews from those.

I’ve arranged a blog tour, but that’s been postponed, seemingly indefinitely, and a couple other efforts have fallen through. It’s been a challenge. Word of mouth seems to be the only really helpful process.

Advice for a Young Writer: Just Do It. Or Don’t.

So, Contradictions: Love to write, hate to write; enchanted by my words, hate my words. Physical pain, willing to work through it. Want to sell, hate to market. Would rather be working in the garden, but time is running out to get my stories on paper.

If a young person told me she wanted to become a writer, my comment would be: contradictions are a way of life. Just do it. Or don’t.

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All about historical fiction (awriterofhistory.com)

A Ball of Golden Thread

Posted on September 29, 2021 by M.K. Tod

Deborah Lincoln is the author of Agnes Canon’s War and An Irish Wife. She specializes in fictional retellings of almost-lost stories from her own family’s past, with characters both well-known and obscure. To get a sense of the stories she writes, consider this quote that I borrowed from her website.

“In historical fiction, great events bring a poignancy to the lives of everyday people, to their efforts to survive and prosper. My work celebrates those brave, smart and anonymous women and men, honors their triumphs and hardships, and pays tribute to their memories.“

Today, Deborah shares thoughts on creating the natural environment for a story.

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When I first read The Scarlet Letter, I was captivated by the idea that within a very few miles of the new world’s coastline stretched a dense and primeval forest (Hawthorne’s lovely descriptions) and I imagined myself an eagle flying over that forest that stretched forever, untouched. I wanted so much to see it, know it the way it was then and would never be again. I rebuilt it in my mind, smelled its scents, absorbed its sounds. Imagined the busyness of its small and large inhabitants and their absorption in the immediacy of their moments. And I wanted to build that world so others would see it, too.

That is the sense of place that I find crucial to telling a story, especially a story based in the rural past, in which the characters are so much closer to the natural world than we can be today. I want to call up the childhood, even racial memories lying deep inside us all that can be triggered by the rank rich smell of a humid summer’s day or the chorus of crickets at dusk. My characters need to be shaped by the land and elements because they are so much more dependent on them for their safety and sustenance. “For once we no longer live beneath our mother’s heart,” says Louise Erdrich, “it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying completely on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.” If we, the human race, still felt that, we would perhaps not be in the climate crisis we’re now experiencing.

Vegetation and wildlife are important to developing a sense of place.

In my writing I’ve tried evoking the sense of place first by visiting the area I’m writing about, as most writers do. For my first book, AGNES CANON’S WAR, that was the village of Oregon in northwest Missouri, as well as Virginia City and the Gallatin River valley in Montana. I grew up in the Midwest, so the humid summers, crisp, frigid winters, the flash of lightning bugs and the whine of mosquitos in the dark were all memories that I drew on to evoke an atmosphere.

I refreshed my memory of the vegetation, the birds and the animal life—and did my research to be sure those species existed in the mid-nineteenth century, the setting for my story. It wouldn’t do to insert a family of nutria in the creek in 1855 when they weren’t introduced into the United States until 1899.

Oregon, Missouri: The town of Lick Creek, setting for AGNES CANON’S WAR

For my second book, AN IRISH WIFE, I needed to go beyond my own stomping grounds, east to the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, a different setting from the flat farmlands I grew up in, and get a sense of the distances, what the horizon looks like, the sunsets and rainclouds over the hills and the geology, including what might lie underground. I toured a slope-entry coal mine to feel the weight of a mountain pressing in on me and to soak up the sense of dark and closeness, of menace, that working below the surface might provoke. I studied maps of mines, examined diagrams of geological strata, collected photographs of miners and their equipment taken deep underground. Odd as it sounds, annual reports of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Industrial Statistics dating from the mid-1880s were fascinating. Thank goodness for the Internet.

Experience what your characters would have experienced. Inside an abandoned coal mine. (Photo by Brian Moran)

“Sense of place gives equilibrium,” Eudora Welty writes (On Writing, 1956), “extended, it is sense of direction too.” A writer can achieve an unflinching authenticity when she conveys a sense of place, and as Mary’s survey of her readers discovered, those readers want a time and place to be brought to life. As Welty says, “. . . it is the sense of place going with us still that is the ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the word to bring us home.”

Thanks, Deborah, for sharing your thoughts on creating a time and place for readers. I’ve read An Irish Wife and can still feel the dirt and despair of the coal mines of Pennsylvania, the deep prejudice against Irish Catholics, and the blossoming of young love amidst the nearby forests. A highly recommended story!

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