Meet Judith Lindbergh

We recently connected with Judith Lindbergh and have shared our conversation below.

Judith, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I’ve been knocked down more times than I can count. I’m surprised I’m still all in one piece, and honestly, stronger than ever. My first career goal was to be a ballerina. This wasn’t the fantasy of a little girl in a tutu. I trained for over a decade and was really very good, but my body decided that it wanted to be rounder than a ballet dancer’s ideal permitted. I was about sixteen, and too young to understand that my life wasn’t quite over yet.

I shifted to theater dance where my body type was more acceptable, but after dancing professionally for seven years, I realized that being in the chorus wasn’t for me. I moved into acting, but didn’t get terribly far with a resume full of dance credits. Finally, I was working temp jobs in New York City to make ends meet, sitting in some unfamiliar office every week typing other people’s words and generally bored to death. So I started writing letters in my downtime–real letters that I mailed in an envelope with a stamp. When I ran out of friends to write to, I started writing poems and short stories. When one of those stories grew beyond the bounds of “short,” I realized I was writing a novel.

It took years and countless rejections to see my first novel, THE THRALL’S TALE, published, and even more years to celebrate the launch of my latest novel, AKMARAL.

Through it all, I knew that I had to be creative, whether I was dancing, acting, or writing. I couldn’t just give up and choose the path of least resistance. If I did, I would have betrayed my true self. And all the struggle, all the rejection, just made me more determined. Like the calluses I had on my ages-ago dancer’s feet, I had to toughen up and endure a lot of pain to become strong enough to achieve my objectives.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am the author of two historical novels. My latest, AKMARAL, is about a nomad woman warrior on the ancient Central Asian steppes. My debut novel, THE THRALL’S TALE, is about three women in Viking Age Greenland. Clearly I love writing about women in ancient times and obscure places! I am also the founder/director of a creative writing center, The Writers Circle. We offer classes in suburban New Jersey and online. Our mission is to nurture a love of creative writing in students of all ages, from eight years old to over 80.

I never planned to run a business, only to teach a few classes while I waited for my second novel to sell. But publishing is a fickle business and my timing was terrible. I submitted the first finished draft of AKMARAL to my agent in 2009, right in the middle of the Great Recession. The publishing industry was contracting along with everything else, and no one was willing to take a chance on a literary historical novel about a place and time most people had never heard of. But I had to do something to make a living while I waited for publishing to shake out and open up. Who knew that 1) it would take over a decade, and 2) I would discover a love for teaching and a talent for business that I never imagined I would?

When I teach, I rarely focus on publishing. I always talk about being true to each student’s voice, their vision, and their craft. You must commit yourself to the process and the discovery that comes with getting ideas on the page. And trust me, it can get messy!

From our earliest days in grade school, we are expected to write efficiently. We are given a rubric, taught to make an outline, and apparently, if we simply follow the plan, we’ll produce a successful piece of work. But creative writing—all writing, in my experience—simply doesn’t work that way. You have to throw down a bunch of messy, half-baked ideas, and choppy, ill-formed sentences. I call it making the clay, which is just a pile of sticky, red-brown dirt. It has no shape, no expression, no meaning. Like a sculpture, a writer must take time to work with the clay, to discover their own ideas and ways of expressing them.

I never trouble even my youngest writers about grammar, spelling, or even whether their ideas make sense. We talk about intention—what a character wants—and world building, backstory, emotions, and relationships. We talk about how all those things combine to create a character who takes action, who behaves and expresses themselves in a way that is authentic to them and that propels a narrative forward. This is how a story slowly takes form. And it takes countless drafts and a lot of determination to polish our raw-clay words into a masterpiece.

All of the instructors at The Writers Circle understand and teach this way because they are all published writers, too. You have to understand viscerally the struggles and joys of creativity in order to guide others to commit to doing the same. That is the key to what we do at The Writers Circle. Creativity is not a formula. It is a journey. At The Writers Circle, we share that journey with our students, cheering and supporting them from first messy draft to whatever “The End” means to them.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I’ve always been a perfectionist, which has been both a blessing and a curse. There’s a great quote from Anne Lamott’s classic BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.” And she’s right when referring to a first draft, which is the context of the quote. You have to allow yourself to be completely open and to make wrong turns when you’re discovering what your story really wants to be. But later, when you’re revising the third…, fourth…, even fifth drafts, perfectionism is what makes the difference between a decent manuscript and a really polished piece of writing.

I’ve balanced perfectionism with deep curiosity and risk-taking in my work. I take years to research and write my novels, working to understand distant cultures and lives that are very different from our own. I love discovering new details that I can weave into my characters and plots. Because I’m generally focused on obscure points in history, my work rarely follows popular trends. That’s one risk that I’m willing to take. Writing for me is about fulfilling a vision that calls to me for reasons I can rarely explain. While I would love to become a bestselling author, I would prefer it be for my unique, original work, rather than because I followed some popular trend.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

After spending the last several months promoting AKMARAL, I am looking forward to facing the blank page yet again. My page won’t be entirely blank; I have a couple of novels in progress that I’ve backburnered during this very busy time. But I don’t know which one has the greatest potential to come together into a viable book. And I certainly don’t know whether either of them will sell.

Publishing is in a serious state of flux right now with the “Big Five” traditional publishing houses leaning heavily on books that they hope will support their bottom line. Meanwhile, smaller presses are picking up the riskier titles that once would have had the monetary and promotional support of the “Big Five.” So, if I want to make money, I probably have to write for the market which, as mentioned above, isn’t something I tend to do. Or I must choose to write for my soul and accept that my work may never find an outlet—at least, not one that pays very much for my work.

Sure, self-publishing is always an option, which is also part of what has caused such a massive shift in the publishing landscape. But for every success story of a self-published author, there are hundreds—no, hundreds-of-thousands—that can tell a very different tale. And artificial intelligence is also impacting publishing. So far, not serious literary works, but it’s just a matter of time.

So, do I write for money or for my soul? I am firmly in the soul camp. But almost all writers struggle to balance their creative work with making a living. That’s why I am truly blessed with The Writers Circle: I don’t have to compromise my creativity for my day job. Every day The Writers Circle keeps me connected and committed to doing what I truly love and sharing it with others.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://judithlindbergh.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/judithlindbergh/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/judith.lindbergh
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/judith-lindbergh-5a6b724/
• Twitter: https://x.com/JudithLindbergh
• Other: https://judithlindbergh.substack.com/