Diana Gabaldon: Her Novels Flout Convention
by Anne Stephenson
Publisher’s Weekly, copyright © 1997, all rights reserved.

January 6, 1997
(Diana has said that she thinks this is the most accurate interview she has read.)

As a writer, Diana Gabaldon has not walked the conventional road. A scientist for 12 years (she has degrees in zoology and marine biology and a Ph.D. in behavioral ecology), she did not try her hand at fiction until she was well into her 30’s, only landing an agent after posting excerpts from her first novel on a writer’s forum on CompuServe. She doesn’t have an ounce of Scottish blood in her and had never even been to Scotland when she wrote her first novel, Outlander, a 600-page historical saga set in the 18th century Highlands. When that book launched a career, Gabaldon proved that sometimes a circuitous route is the best way to the top.

Curiosity about Gabaldon has run so high since Outlander was published in 1991 that she can no longer answer all of her mail and has taken to posting answers to her fans’ questions on the Internet. There is a Diana Gabaldon homepage on the Web, a Diana Gabaldon room on AOL, and a newsletter for the computer-impaired. Now Delacorte has published Drums of Autumn (Forecasts, Nov. 18), her fourth novel about the intrepid 18th-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his time-travelling wife, Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser. Her longest book yet, it is the first in what Gabaldon calls the “New World trilogy,” which finds Claire and Jamie in North Carolina, making a home for themselves on the eve of the American Revolution. Note the word “trilogy.” Autumn’s 880 pages notwithstanding, the story of Jamie and Claire does not end with this volume.

Even after five years, one question haunts Gabaldon’s series: What kind of books are they? Romance? Adventure? Fantasy or science fiction? Historical or military saga? Delacorte distributed promotional copies of Outlander at the Romance Writers of America Convention but has always published Gabaldon in hardcover and now treats her books as general fiction. While it’s true that Outlander has enough sex in it “to boil Loch Lomand,” as one critic said, Gabaldon has heard from plenty of romance writers who say her books don’t fit the bill. The problems, they insist, are obvious: her books are at least twice as long as conventional romances and are written largely in the first person. In Outlander, Claire is a British WWII nurse who steps through a skew in a Scottish stone circle and is sent back to 1743 and into her Highlander’s arms. She is older than Jamie. He’s a virgin when they meet. She’s not. The victim in a graphic rape scene is Jamie, not Claire. And against the convention of any true romantic hero, Jamie Fraser has red hair.

“I don’t have anything against romance,” says Gabaldon good-naturedly, meeting PW in her big airy house on the outskirts of Phoenix, which she shares with three kids, a husband and several large dogs. She is 45 now, but looks younger, it’s easy to imagine her as a character in one of her books (the mistress of a Scottish laird, perhaps, or a witch who casts her spells from ancient stone circles on the Scottish moors).

I like romance novels,” she continues, “But I think most romance writers are redoing either Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, and my books don’t fit that standard. There’s a good love story in them, and a certain amount of sex, but there the resemblance ceases. I get letters from people who read nothing but romance, who say, ‘I shied away from your book because it was so big and because there was a lot of history in it, but my friend forced it on me and I loved it.’ I also hear from people who say, ‘I don’t read romances, I’ve always thought they were trash, but someone forced your book on me and now I can’t believe what I was missing.’ Go figure.”

Gabaldon has a rampant imagination and survives on very little sleep. She was born and raised in Arizona and has always lived there, except for a brief stint in Philadelphia while her husband was in graduate school. From childhood, she fancied herself a storyteller but studied science so she could make a living. When she and her husband returned from Philadelphia, she was hired at the Center for Environmental Studies at Arizona State University. Her job was to computerize data, and since there was very little software available, she wrote her own programs for the lofty purpose, she says, “of analyzing bird gizzards.”

In 1982, her daughter was born. Shortly thereafter, her husband, Doug Watkins, left his corporate job to start a software design business. Because the family needed extra money, Gabaldon, now a computer expert of sorts, wrote freelance software reviews for computer magazines. When one of them sent her a program that included a trial membership to CompuServe, her life was changed forever.

On CompuServe, she found the Literary Forum, an electronic cocktail party for writers and readers. After months of attending the festivities, she had an idea.

“I had all the work I could handle from the computer magazines,” she says, “I had a full-time job at the university. We were having children. And from some reason, I thought it was the ideal time to begin writing a novel.”

To this day, she calls Outlander her “practice novel,” something she wrote “just to get the idea of what it took to write a book. I’d find out whether or not I really wanted to do it, and I’d know a little more about it when it came time to tackle the real book. But first, I’d write something for practice and I’d never show it to anybody.”

She decided that it would be easiest to write a historical novel. She knew it would take research, but she had a university library at her disposal (“I figured if I turned out not to have any imagination, I cold steal things from the historical record,” she says). She was groping for a place to start when, one night, she saw a rerun of the science fiction show Dr. Who on public television. The episode featured a Scottish character, a young man who lived in 1745 and looked very good in a kilt. His name was Jamie.

“That caught my attention,” says Gabaldon. “I was sitting in church the next day during the sermon thinking idly of this and that and I said to myself, well, you’ve got to start somewhere. Why not 18th-century Scotland?” That was it. I went outside after church and dug a piece of scrap paper out from under the front seat of my car and began to write Outlander. No outline, no plot. Just a time and place and Jamie.

“I made two rules for myself. The first was don’t stop. Finish this book. The second was to be honest to the characters and to the situation. Don’t shy off from anything. Go through it, because that’s the way to learn. Many beginning writers feel very shy because they have a sense of self-exposure. I had none of that, because I was never going to show the novel to anyone. If I’d written some of the scenes in Outlander with the expectation that someone would read them, I’d have pulled my punches a lot more.”

Few scientists have the flair for storytelling that seems to come naturally to Gabaldon, but she insists that she wasn’t hampered by her scientific background. “People have this idea of science as a very rigid forum for people with logical and orderly minds, and they think writing is deeply intuitive,” she says. “But both require the same ability to look at chaos and pick out patterns from it. Science, in looking and in the asking of questions, is a very intuitive process. The best scientists can look at a huge, confusing array of data and find the important things, and that’s exactly what a novelist does. You find the pattern of your story.”

She wrote late at night when her family was asleep and didn’t tell anyone, even her husband, what she was doing. He found out months later when he searched her computer directory for one of his own documents and found 81 files called “Jamie.” He now looks on the series with congenial good humor but teases her that she doesn’t know anything about men.

Gabaldon read everything she could find about Scottish history and listened to tapes of live performances of Scottish musicians, trying to grasp the cadence and charm of their language in the banter between the players and their audiences. She paid attention and learned that hotel clerk in New York would say, “Can I help you?” A hotel clerk in London would say, “May I help you?” But a hotel clerk in Inverness would say “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?”

Launched on the Internet
The novel emerged in “chunks,” which she strung together in an ever more coherent story. She’d been at it for several months when she got into an argument with a friend on the Literary Forum about how it felt for a woman to be pregnant. On a whim, she posted an excerpt from Outlander in which Jamie Fraser’s sister, Jenny, explains to him what pregnancy feels like.

“I thought it was readable,” Gabaldon says. “I didn’t think I’d be embarrassed if people saw it, so I put it in the CompuServe library and everyone who had been following the argument read it, then came rushing back and said this is great. What is it?

“I said it was a book I was writing, and they encouraged me to put up more. I did, and got the same kind of response. After that, whenever, I had a chunk that would stand alone, I’d put it up in the library and people would read them and talk about them.”

She discovered that she like having people read what she was writing and began to ask published authors who frequented the Literary Forum about the process of getting a book into print. Find an agent, they told her. She was encouraged most by romance writer Judith McNaught’s story about finding her own agent, Perry Knowlton. “The thing that struck me was that she described her first book as being unusual,” says Gabaldon, “and it occurred to me by that time that I had a very unusual book.”

Science-fiction mystery writer John Stith, a Knowlton client whom she met through the Forum, introduced her to his agent, who took her on after reading her manuscript. She finished Outlander, sent it off to him and, one week later, when she was in New York for a scientific conference, she went to see Knowlton in his office.

“I’d never met him face to face, and I was feeling more than a little trepidation,” she says. “What if he didn’t like it and wanted to give it back? He made small talk and tried to put me at ease. All the time, I could see my manuscript sitting on his desk in these huge, orange manuscript boxes and I was sure that he was going to say, ‘Well, I’m very sorry.’ Instead, he talked about his other clients. I was staggered to realize that he also represented Tony Hillerman, Frederick Forsyth and Robertson Davies. But then he said, ‘The thing about Freddie Forsyth and Robertson Davies, is that they are both great storytellers.’ And he smiled and put a hand on the box and said: ‘And you’re another one.’ I felt as if I’d been beatified.”

Knowlton sent Outlander to five editors and within days had three offers. They chose Delacorte for the opportunity to work with the editor Jackie Cantor, which was, says Gabaldon, “one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.” Gabaldon was able to retire from her university job after she finished Outlander’s sequel, Dragonfly in Amber. The third book, Voyager, made the New York Times bestseller list, and Drums of Autumn has a first printing of 155,000. There are now more than two million copies of her books in print.

She still posts portions of her books-in-progress on CompuServe, not because she wants criticism but because she is a self-described “exhibitionist at heart.” She has four more books under contract with Delacorte: the fifth Jamie and Claire book, a prequel to the series focusing on Jamie’s parents and two mysteries set in contemporary Phoenix.

After years of struggling to categorize her books, she’s finally devised a label she can live with. “I call them historical fantasias,” she says. “They’re rooted in history but have a very strong element of fantasy. The mysteries are different - different people, different narrators and tone. It helps me to work on two things at once. It keeps me from getting stuck. But of course it’s not for everyone. My husband sometimes puts his hands on my head and asks if I’m no afraid that my brain is going to overheat.”

Reprinted with permission by Publisher’s Weekly.