|
About
the Books
The Frequently
Asked Questions about Diana Gabaldon and The Outlander Series have
been taken from her answers to the questions from her online fans (America OnLine
and CompuServe). In most cases, the answers are direct quotes from Diana's posts.
In others, she has edited the original answer to include more information.
Readers be cautioned
that some of the answers to these questions will contain SPOILERS. If you don't
want to know anything about the future books, be cautious in your reading. I will
try to note which questions contain spoilers.
(After following
a link below, simply select the "Back" key in your browser to return to the index.)
Publishing
Information
Outlander
Series
Outlander
(Cross Stitch in the UK) (1991)
Dragonfly in Amber (1992)
Voyager (1994)
Drums of Autumn (1997)
The Fiery Cross (2001)
A Breath of Snow and Ashes (2005)
Book 7 (not yet published)
The Outlandish
Companion (Through the Stones in the UK)(1999)
Lord John
Series
Lord John and
the Hellfire Club (only available as an audio download)(1998)
Lord John and the Succubus (originally published as a novella in the Legends II:
Dragon, Sword, and King anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg (available at Amazon)
(2004)
Lord John and the Private Matter (2003)
Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade (not yet published)
Lord John and the Haunted Soldier (not yet published)
Thomas Kolodzi
Series
Red Ant's Head
(not yet published)
Miscellaneous
Anthologies
Fathers and
Daughters: A Celebration in Memoirs (1999)
Mothers and Daughters: Celebrating the Gift of Love (1998)
Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historical Crime (1999)
Excalibur (1995)
Jenseits von Avalon (German) (1999)
Mothers & Sons: A Celebration in Memoirs, Stories, and Photographs (Anthology)
(2000)
top
Where
did you get the idea for a time-travel novel?
I had meant Outlander
to be a straight historical novel; but when I introduced Claire (around the third
day of writing--it was the scene where she meets Dougal and the others in the
cottage), she wouldn't cooperate. Dougal asked her who she was, and without my
stopping to think who she should be, she drew herself up, stared belligerently
at him and said "Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?" She promptly
took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass modern remarks
about everything. At which point I shrugged and said, "Fine. Nobody's ever going
to see this book, so it doesn't matter what bizarre thing I do--go ahead
and be modern, and I'll figure out how you got there later." So the time-travel
was all her fault. {grin}
[Web Author's Note:
Diana has also stated that she placed Claire as a traveler from the 1940's for
two reasons :
- She wanted Claire's
transition to the past to be as smooth as possible. Thus, coming from both the
hardships of post-war Europe and the travels with her Uncle Lamb, the transition
to Jacobite Scotland would not be so unbelievable, and
- She didn't want
to have to go into her future to write Claire's future.]
top
How
did Outlander get published?
Well, first I was
going to write a book for practice and never show it to anybody. {grin}
Nevertheless, I
posted a piece of the book in the CompuServe Literary Forum in order to win an
argument I was having with a man about how it feels to be pregnant. A lot of people
who'd been following the argument read the piece (it's the bit from Outlander,
where Jenny explains to Jamie what it feels like), and they all said, "Hey, this
is good! What is it and where's some more?" And so I put up more, and people read
it, and....eventually, John Stith (who writes wonderful science fiction/mysteries,
by the way) offered to introduce me to his agent, whom I'd heard many good things
about from a number of published writers I'd met online.
The agent took
me on, on the basis of an unfinished manuscript, and once I did finish it, sent
it to five editors whom he thought might like it. Four days later, three of them
had called back wanting to buy it, and we were kind of off to the races.
I told him that
by the time I finished Outlander, I knew there was more to the story,
but I thought I'd better stop while I could still lift the manuscript. So he told
the publishers who wanted the book that there was more story, and Delacorte said,
"Well, it sounds like you have enough material for a trilogy, we'll give you a
three-book contract." So they did.
Mind you, this
process--posting, conversations, agent- finding, etc.--took nearly a year of online
interaction; I boil it down just to save time here. But that's essentially it.
top
What
is Cross Stitch?
Cross Stitch
was my original title (it was a play on "a stitch in time"), and the Brits liked
it. The Americans said "It sounds too much like embroidery, can you think of something
more....adventurous?" so I did--Outlander. Also, when I wrote it,
I had in mind that it was one book--and knew only enough about it to be pretty
sure that Claire would "cross" not once, but twice-- future to past, past to future--which
would make an X, which is the basic embroidery cross stitch. It also had to do
with Claire's occupation--that of a healer. Lots of meanings, but overall, not
really a good title, I don't think.
top
Why
is there a date discrepancy between Outlander and Cross Stitch
with regard to the birth of Geillis Duncan?
The discrepancy
in dates is a mistake--it's a copy-editing error caused by differences between
the British edition of the books (which begin in 1946) and the American ones (which
begin in 1945). The reason being that the American book was already in galleys
when we sold Outlander in the UK.
The difference
occurred after Reay Tannahill, a Scot who kindly proofread Cross Stitch
before it was published in the UK, said that 1946 would have been a more accurate
representation of conditions as I described them in Scotland. So I changed the
date- -but the Americans wouldn't let me change it for Outlander,
saying that this would involve re-working all the dates, which would mean re-copy-editing
the whole thing, and they didn't want to do that.
top
Why
did you choose Scotland during the Jacobite period as the setting for your books?
Well, it was an
accident. I was looking for a time in which to set a historical novel, because
I thought that would be the easiest for me to write (I..(ahem)...do know how to
do research). While pondering, I happened to see a rerun of an ancient Dr.
Who episode on PBS--one in which the Doctor had a young Scottish sidekick,
picked up in 1745. The sidekick was a cute little guy, about 17, named Jamie MacCrimmon,
and he looked rather nice in his kilt. And I was sitting in church thinking about
it, and said, "Well, you've got to start somewhere, and it doesn't really matter
where, since no one's ever going to see this--so why not? Scotland, 18th century."
And that's where I started--no outline, no characters, no plot--just a place and
time.
top
Is
there any significance to the title Dragonfly in Amber?
The dragonfly in
amber is sort of a symbol of Jamie and Claire's marriage--not only via the token
Hugh Munroe gives Claire-- but as a metaphor; a means of preserving something
of great beauty that exists out of its proper time. Also, amber is an interesting
substance that's been used for magic and protection for thousands of years. One
fan has suggested the notion of Jamie's past being preserved in artifacts -- I
like it!
top
The
big "romance" question, are they or aren't they?
I've probably read
a couple of hundred "real" romance novels, ranging from traditional category romances
to F/F/P (Futuristic/Fantasy/Paranormal). That's why I say I don't write romance;
because I don't.
It's not just that
I didn't intend to write romance (though I didn't); there are major differences
between what I write and the standard form of the genre--as a good many "real"
romance writers were only too eager to let me know, when Outlander
won the RWA's RITA for Best Book of the Year when it came out.
I joined GEnie
shortly after winning the award, and one (quite well known) author sent me a private
e-mail, saying that she thought she had better come out and tell me, since there
were several messages from her on the board saying so, that she felt it was not
right for Outlander to have won, since "it wasn't really a romance--there
wasn't enough concentration on the relationship between the hero and heroine,
she was older than him (hey, everybody knows you can't do that! (You want
to know how many times I've heard "You can't do THAT in a romance!"--from romance
writers at romance conventions?) they didn't meet until page 69
Judy McNaught--for
one--does Cinderella stories particularly well, and I enjoy them very much. Laura
Kinsale (another favorite author) tends toward Beauty and the Beast, and does
them with an ambition and skill I really admire. (People always ask who my favorite
romance authors are; in addition to McNaught and Kinsale, I love Susan
Elizabeth Phillips, who does wonderful funny, moving stories, and Nora Roberts--one
of the most dependably entertaining novelists I've ever encountered. I've also
liked books by Arnette Lamb, Anne Stuart, Mary Jo Putney, Cheryl Reavis...yeah,
there're a few (g).
Still, my books
don't fit the standard conventions of the modern romance. Outlander
has some elements of a standard romance--enough to make it appealing to romance
readers in general--but the second and third books don't; they deal with an ongoing
relationship between two decent people who already love each other- -there's no
falling-in-love, getting acquainted, now-we-like-each- other-now-we-don't kind
of conflict. It (the Outlander cycle) is primarily an adventure story,
in which history is as important a player as any of the individuals. To say nothing
of which I don't have guaranteed happy endings {grin} (I got threatening letters
after Dragonfly came out--all saying "How dare you end a book
this way, when you know the next one won't be out for a year!" {grin}).
Anyhow, you see
what I'm saying, I trust. I don't object at all to romances, but I don't write
them. I don't observe the conventions of the genre--or any other, for that matter.
I don't like genre
labels in the first place; I would much rather have my books taken on their own
terms--I think they're kind of unique {grin}, and don't belong to any genre
at all. But the way the publishing industry works, books need to have some kind
of label in order to facilitate their being sold.
When we sold Outlander,
the publisher held onto the book for 18 months, trying to figure out what
to sell it as. They finally decided that--of all the different classifications
the books could fit in--"Romance" was by far the largest single market.
top
What
kind of research do you do for your books?
I know a lot of
people do all the research and then begin to write, but that wouldn't work for
me--since I never know what's going to happen, I wouldn't know where to stop researching!
So I don't--I read and research all the time I'm writing. I don't usually know
what I need to know until I find it.
I have about 200
books that belong to the university library (every so often they want one back,
which is a traumatic experience), and I buy them like salted peanuts. By this
time, I have esoteric things like three Gaelic dictionaries and twenty herbals
(guides to botanical medicine), including a reprint of Nicholas Culpeper's herbal
from 1647.
I carry a research
book around in the car, to read at stoplights or at kids' soccer practices, and
I read research stuff while I ride my exercise bike. Sometimes I do have something
specific to look up--like how to extract a tooth, or how many slaves were on the
average sugar plantation in North Carolina in 1767, or how much a black bear weighs,
but it really doesn't take much time to discover a discrete fact--it's the browsing
and finding fascinating items like hanged-men's grease (that's historically true,
by the way--it was one of the perks of an 18th century hangman) that takes time.
Fortunately, it's also fun.
top
How
did you get the accent?
I "got" the Scottish
accents from quite a few sources, but the main one is from Scottish folksong recordings.
Especially in live recordings, groups (like The Corries, for example) will banter
with the audience, and you can hear them talk, as well as pick up idiom and vocabulary
from the songs.
I also read all
the novels I could find with a Scottish setting, particularly those written by
Scots. The Big Book of Scottish Stories is a good one. The "accent"
isn't purely an accent, of course--it's (my approximation of) Scots, which is
a real dialect of English. It's not the same thing as Gaelic, which is a completely
separate language. Scots is English, but has quite a number of specific words
and idioms not found in standard English, and also has its own peculiarly idiosyncratic
sentence structures, which you notice if you start paying close attention.
A really quick
example: A hotel clerk in New York will say, "Can I help you?" A hotel clerk in
London will say, "May I help you?" A hotel clerk in Inverness will say (I've heard
them), "Can I be helpin' ye at all, then?"
I do have The
Concise Scots Dictionary, compiled by Alexander Warrack, but that only
gives individual words, not usage.
I picked up British
vernacular mostly from novels; I've always had a great fondness for British authors
and have read any number of them -- especially a long and intensive exposure to
the works of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy L. Sayers. I'd been reading English novels
for years and years, and could easily see the differences between those and American
novels, both in idiom and vocabulary. And for some strange reason Claire's British
dialogue felt more natural to me than American speech does.
Part of this can
be attributed to half my family tree being British. My great-great grandfather
emigrated from England in the late 1800's and settled in Flagstaff, Arizona where
I grew up--next door. He died (at the age of 92) when I was four or so, but I
do remember him.
top
Your
books are so complex! Do you use an outline?
No. Of course,
I also don't write in a straight line; I write in lots of little pieces
and then glue them together like a jigsaw puzzle. So I'll work forward and back,
backwards and forward, until a scene is finished--then hop somewhere else and
write something different. I don't even have chapters, until just before I print
the completed manuscript to send to my editor; breaking the text into chapters
and titling them is just about the last thing I do to a book.
And yes, now and
then I'll have scenes or fragments that either don't fit or are redundant or extraneous
(I'm sure no one thinks I ever edit or cut anything {grin}, but I really do).
In most cases, though, those scenes can be "recycled" into the next book--one
of the benefits of writing a series. {grin} For example--the brief scene with
Meyer Rothschild, the traveling numismatist, was originally written for Dragonfly.
It wasn't that it didn't fit well there-- but it wasn't necessary, so I removed
it. And lo and behold, it tied in beautifully with the clue of the coins in Voyager,
where I used it in almost the original version, making only small adjustments
for the plot. Meyer of Frankfort was a real historical person, by the way--he
and his uncle were traveling dealers in rare coins, and he was the original founder
of the Rothschild fortune.
Then there are
versions of things that simply don't work--I rewrote the front half of the "frame"
story for Dragonfly seven times before I was happy with it-- keeping
whatever small pieces seemed to work from each iteration.
top
Do
your readers give you ideas?
Well, in all honesty,
not often. I generally know the shape of the story, if not the specifics. Still,
now and then, someone will suggest something that starts a train of thought, and
I do end up with something. I think the only cases I can recall were with a couple
of my LitForum (CompuServe) friends--both people I've known for years, who've
watched the development of the books and characters from the earliest days.
One woman asked--half-kiddingly--what
I thought Jamie would say, think, or do, if he came forward in time and saw his
daughter in a bikini. Now, there's no way he can travel forward in time-- that's
a given in my universe--but it did spark a train of thought that led to that conversation
by moonlight in Voyager, and Claire's letter to her daughter.
And then....well,
I have a dear friend. Who insists that one of her fondest secret ambitions was
to be a carnival geek--you know, the person who bites the heads off live chickens
in the old carnival side-shows? Well, one thing in the conversation led to another,
and I found myself writing in a white geek voodoo priestess with a sideline in
oracles. And if you think that was easy to work into the plot...!
Oh, I'm wrong--there
have been a couple of others, though they weren't so much giving me ideas, as
acting as ideas. Barry Fogden is in fact a very good (and well-known) English
poet-- whose grandfather was a shepherd. Consequently, we (the LitForum people
on CompuServe) have sometimes teased him about his supposed relations with sheep.
And as a usual, one thing led to another, and so we have Father Fogden, the disgraced
and exiled priest of Hispaniola--and his flock. {grin}
To say nothing
of his dog, Ludo, who is a real person (er, so to speak), too. So I wouldn't say
the readers don't influence me, exactly. It's not usually very direct, though.
top
Why
is Outlander written in the first person point of view? That's very
unusual for a romance, isn't it?
Well, I kind of
like to experiment and try new and hair-raising things in terms of structure and
literary technique (not that writing in the first person is). However,
it was just the most comfortable, is the answer.
Now that I know
more about writing, there are other good reasons to have done it, but that's why
I did do it at the time; it felt natural to me. I think I may have felt most comfortable
with this (aside from the minor fact that Claire Beauchamp Randall took over and
began telling the story herself), because practically all of my favorite works
of literature were done this way. If you look at the classic novels of the English
language about half of them are written in the first person, from Moby Dick
to David Copperfield, Swiss Family Robinson, Treasuer
Island --even large chunks of the Bible are written in the first person!
(I point this out with great regularity to romance readers who come up to me at
conferences and ask "How did you dare to write a book in the first person?"
"Easy," I say, "I just sat down and typed 'I'. (cough)
Which is not to
say that there are no drawbacks to it, or that it suits everyone. But if it fits
your style and your story, why on earth not?
The framing story
of Dragonfly is written partly in Claire's first-person voice, partly
in the third-person voice of Roger Wakefield. And, If you look at the first half
of Voyager, you'll see that it's done in a "braided" technique, telling
Jamie's story in third person in a linear chronology, Claire's story in first
person backwards, in flashback, and using the sections in Roger's voice as the
"turn" points that trigger the other two voices. It is, if you'll pardon the immodesty,
a fairly ambitious thing to do, in terms of literary technique, yet I think it
works reasonably well. Still, Claire's voice is by far the most comfortable for
me to use.
top
What
have been the most difficult sections for you to write?
Difficult? Goodness,
all of them. Well, not really, but it is work, you know, even though a great deal
of fun. As for emotional difficulty, which is what I suspect you mean--Claire's
farewell letter to Bree, the rape scene in Outlander, the farewell
scene in Dragonfly in Amber, and a few others that don't come immediately
to mind. The ones you'd expect, in other words.
top
Are
all the locations used in the books real?
Well, places like
Inverness, Loch Ness and Fort William are naturally real, as are Paris, Fontainebleu,
Cap Haitien, etc. If you mean the stone circle....I don't know. Bear in mind that
I had never been to Scotland when I wrote Outlander. When I finally did go, I
found a stone circle very like the one I described, at a place called Castlerigg.
There is also a place near Inverness called the Clava Cairns, which has a stone
circle, and another place called Tomnahurich, which is supposed to be a fairy's
hill, but I've never been there, so I don't know how like it is. So far as I know,
there isn't a physical basis for Lallybroch, but then again, I do repeatedly find
things that really exist after I've written them, so I really wouldn't be at all
surprised.
top
Are
the books out in audio format?
All the books are
presently out on commercial tapes, published by BDD
Audio. The tapes are beautifully read and produced, but they're very much
abridged; only about one-fifth of Outlander is on the tapes. The
books are read by Geraldine James. All four readings consist of four cassettes
and are six hours.
Unabridged tapes
are also available from Recorded Books.
All four books have been narrated by Davina Porter, and are available for either
rent or purchase. Outlander has 23 cassettes and is 32.5 hours, Dragonfly in Amber
has 27 cassettes and is 39.5 hours, Voyager has 30 cassettes and is 43.75 hours,
and Drums of Autumn has 33 cassettes and is 45.75 hours.
In addition, I
read Outlander and Dragonfly (in their entirety!) for
Reading for the Blind, and I was told by a blind person who called me recently
that the Talking Books program has all the books, unabridged. I'm told (I haven't
heard them) that all the books are available from the Library of Congress's Talking
Books program.
top
|
