From Slave to Warrior: Discovering Myself Through Writing Historical Fiction

A young girl, a beauty, a favorite filled with promise and hope—until she becomes a victim and a slave.

A young girl, an orphan, alone but embraced and supported by her community, guided by wisdom and respect to become all that she must be.

That girl is me. They both are. Like Janus, looking forward and backward, to what was and what would be, all of it recorded through my fiction.

(Surviving Over 30 Years of the Writing Life.)

We are told, “Write what you know,” from our earliest elementary school essays to MFA programs, and especially now when the boundaries of what writers are allowed to imagine (or at least allowed to publish) are increasingly defined by our lived experiences and identities.

But as a historical novelist, my presence is hidden in the complex context of the past, in deep layers of research and work to develop authentic characters and cultures that are definitely not my own. Nevertheless, the truth of my subconscious comes through, often in deeply complicated ways.

So, please let me explain what I know about being a warrior and a slave.

THE SLAVE

When I began writing my debut novel, The Thrall’s Tale, I felt trapped. The book was about women in Viking Age Greenland, but specifically focused on a young, enslaved woman descended from an Irish captive. My own captivity was metaphorical, thank goodness, and largely self-imposed. At the time, I was hemmed in by a demeaning job that I needed but hated, struggling for freedom against a subconscious prison made of the scars of an abusive childhood. I hadn’t yet worked through the coming years of therapy to discover how the metaphor of my character’s misery was embodied in my own life. I was crushed by the fear that change was impossible, that my expectations for my life were based on ego and not evidence, that I could never escape my circumstantial or psychic bondage.

I poured my despair into The Thrall’s Tale, writing to purge my pain. I consciously chose Jungian archetypes for my characters: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. At the time I worked a few blocks from the Jung Institute in New York City and would visit on my lunch hour, reading deeply Carl Jung’s concepts about the universality of themes and symbols across culture, time, and space. I saw in them a brilliant narrative tension between the stages of womanhood. So I chose the triad for my three focal characters—a vengeful, unwanted child; a battered, resentful mother; and a wise but ostracized crone. I didn’t understand that that same tension existed within me.

Writing is a deeply psychological experience, once you get past the technicalities of “Show. Don’t tell.” To write authentic characters, you must embody their psyches and experiences. But what if your characters are embodied within you?

Back then, my own vengeful inner-child wanted to prove she was worthy of attention and love. My oppressed internal mother had resigned herself to a stultifying daily existence when the deepest part of her wanted so much more. And the wise woman within knew that life is not easy and that one rarely gets what one hopes for or dreams. In my novel, these three women were impossibly intertwined and yet unable to affect change for themselves or each other, just as I couldn’t see my way out for myself. I even found justification for my literary choices in my research: the Norns, three Old Norse deities who wove my characters’ destinies, would always intervene. Indeed, the Vikings believed in the fixedness of fate, and apparently, at that time, so did I.

THE SHIFT

I recall my writing teacher Madeleine L’Engle’s wisdom all those years ago when I told her that I was pregnant. Along with genuine congratulations, she’d cautioned, “They won’t be the most productive years for your writing.” And in this, she was right.

In fact, I was terrified of becoming a mother. In The Thrall’s Tale, I expressed this fear by creating a despised child who is the product of a horrific rape. For me, the rape was a metaphor for a lot of things, some I understood back then, some that come to me now more clearly. For me, motherhood promised to strike the final deathblow to my hopeless existence. I would never accomplish what I longed to if I was saddled with a child. I delayed for years, until it was almost too late. But by the time I got pregnant—by choice, I must say—therapy had already started breaking my psychic bonds. I was semi-consciously ready for what would come.

No parent expects problems, and in retrospect, ours were relatively small. Our first child was born a couple of weeks early and severely jaundiced. This child who I thought would ruin my life suddenly became my raison d’etre. Whether is was the power of postpartum hormones or a radical perspective shift, there I was at his side in the NICU 18 hours a day, then at home pumping breastmilk through the night just to bring it back to him in the morning. From a woman who wasn’t even sure she wanted the responsibility, this mothering instinct came as a shock. Soon enough, things calmed down. We took him home and I turned back to my writing, often while simultaneously nursing, letting him fall asleep on my lap as I leaned forward to type over his infant dreams.

But the fierce, protective feeling didn’t diminish. It became stronger as he grew. Suddenly being needed—and not in a selfish, narcissistic sense—turned my intense focus outward and away. In a few years, I was ready to try again—for a second child and for a novel that harnessed that fierceness into something powerfully feminine and yet feminist. In my next book, I would become a warrior.

THE WARRIOR

When I say warrior, I’m not talking about violence. In fact, inspiration came because I didn’t like violence at all. Now I was the mother of two sons, but a classic proponent of nonviolence, advocating for gender neutral toys and non-aggressive games. I wanted my kids to meditate and be vegetarians. I vetoed watching violence on TV until my husband tucked our eldest next to him on the couch to watch Star Wars. Our son was only three and I was furious. Looking back, it’s almost laughable.

The truth is, my boys were very physical, and not in your commonplace roughhousing way. For three years, my youngest thought he was a knight in shining armor—which was my fault for taking him to the Medieval Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He practiced jousting in the backyard with a swimming noodle for a lance. The two boys would battle with Nerf swords so often that our shouts of “No head-shots! Not the eyes!” became a neighborhood joke. The boys have grown to be lovely, gentle young men who tease me about it even now. But at the time, their natural inclinations brought me to a crisis: How does a peace-loving, nonviolent mom raise two extremely rough-and-tumble boys?

Even as I reveled when they dressed up in helmets and fake chainmail, I wrestled with conscious discomfort, searching for acceptance by putting myself in their place. What would bring me to raise a weapon and defend or attack? I knew without a breath that I would fight to protect those very same violent, beautiful children.

I found a moment in ancient history that gave me the opportunity to embody the woman warrior concept not as a fantasy superhero, but as a complicated woman dealing with complex questions around womanhood, motherhood, and the sacrifices we make to protect those we love. My main character Akmaral is inspired by archaeological discoveries in Central Asia that prove that women were both warriors and leaders in the 5th century BCE. Throughout the novel, Akmaral’s core responsibility is to protect her tiny clan, training in mounted archery, sword, and spear. The goal was defensive warfare—essentially, keeping the family safe, which was also, essentially, mine.

Looking back at every one of those early mothering campaigns and countless more, I know that I failed, and my boys are far better for my failures. Had I succeeded, I never would have acknowledged who my sons really were or allowed them to grow into themselves. In failing, I had to confront the reason for my fight. I wanted my sons to help create a gentler world. I had grown up with violence and refused to perpetuate it in my own adult life. But pacifism wasn’t the answer to my pain. Becoming a warrior myself was.

Check out Judith Lindbergh’s Akmaral here:

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THE WISE WOMAN

In my writing classes, I lean into the idea that we each know far more than the literal circumstances of our experience. What we do when writing fiction is expand our life experience by applying it to different contexts that might not be our own. The extended metaphor of life’s countless struggles can live large in fiction. Writing is an invitation to focus deeply on a character’s truth that, consciously or otherwise, could and should be our own.

In The Thrall’s Tale, I represented the three Jungian archetypes as three separate women. In Akmaral, I integrated them into a single woman’s journey which, in subtle ways, mirrors my own. As I look to my latest projects-in-progress, I see another aspect of myself, the woman who must look beyond self to legacy. My themes are shifting to mirror my newest emotional quandaries. The difference is that I now see these underlying currents much sooner. I’m more in touch with my own mind and the struggles of my soul making sense of this life’s twisted journey. With my next works, will I finally grow into the wise crone who has understood her significance and impermanence, accepting both with resignation and resilience? She’s someone I’ve been searching for—a presence in all of my writing so far.

Buried beneath the words, I am still working to understand myself and this complicated thing that is life. The work is more than storytelling. It is emotional, psychic, and deeply spiritual. It is the author searching for herself.

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