One day when Russell Lunsford was a Chief Warrant Officer in the military, a Master Sergeant made her way into a group of soldiers covered in dirt and sand from combat in Afghanistan. She approached Lunsford with a stack of papers and angrily declared she was angry at him for “killing” someone. It was an accusation that baffled the crowd now watching the confrontation—and one that he was ready to explain.
The person Lunsford “killed” was a character in his debut novel, “Letters from a Captive Heart.” The Master Sergeant had been an early reader for Lunsford, who was grieving a fictional character.
“It was a pretty tense moment,” Lunsford said. But to him, the Master Sergeant’s reaction was a good thing. “I had accomplished what I wanted to accomplish. You have to feel for the character, and when the character dies, you have to be devastated.”
“Letters from a Captive Heart” was largely written while Lunsford was stationed in Kuwait. Working at the headquarters gave him access to a laptop and (some) free time to write.
“I penned the last chapter on the plane ride home. And then I didn’t touch it for four years,” he said.
Being a soldier provided Lunsford the insight needed to write a war story, even if this particular novel was about the experiences of Korean War POWs. The impetus for “Letters” came from a class Lunsford taught about these POWs, so before starting, he already had both experience in the military and plenty of knowledge about the time period.
But the commitment to facts is not isolated to his books for adults. Lunsford’s children’s book about George Washington accumulated around 30 pages worth of research notes.
“I want to get the history right. Especially if a bunch of kids are going to read it in schools. So I usually edit four or five times,” he said.
Ben Tuggle is Lunsford’s flagship children’s series. Right now, there are two entries—the one where Ben Tuggle meets Washington, and another where he meets Daniel Boone. Boone has, in particular, provided a well of inspiration for Lunsford. In 2020, he published an unrelated children’s book about the frontiersman called Daniel Boone’s Kentucky, complete with maps and facts for a younger demographic.
One challenge as a historical fiction writer, for his adult and children’s stories alike, is to not have the history part overtake the creative side, otherwise it can feel artificial and disrupt the story’s pacing.
“If you’re reading it and you think, ‘Why did he stick that in there? That doesn’t make sense.’ If the story is going along and (the characters) are walking down the street and you’re going along and boom, there’s that fact… the challenge is making it fit into the story and streamline it so that it actually seems like part of the story. It’s fun to do that. And when it comes together, you just sit back and smile,” Lunsford said.
Lunsford pulls heavily from his favorite writers. Among these is fellow Adair Countian and bestselling author, Janice Holt Giles. Both writers have one key element in common: life in Adair County provided a major source of inspiration; a Korean War-era Columbia is featured extensively in “Letters from a Captive Heart.”
Outside of writing, Lunsford visits schools across the commonwealth to discuss writing and history, mostly through the lens of his Ben Tuggle and Daniel Boone books. There, his message to young writers is often to just sit down and get started.
“The more you write, the better you get at it. You’ll never be as good as you want to be… I just want to write what I enjoy writing and researching,” Lunsford said.
By Kenley Godby
kenley@adairvoice.com
