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Interview with Diana
Gabaldon
By Susan Perry
Diana
Gabaldon is the New York Times bestselling author of the
Outlander saga: Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, Drums
of Autumn, and a companion book to the series, The Outlandish
Companion. (In the UK, Outlander
is titled Cross Stitch, and The Outlandish
Companion is titled Through the Stones.) The next book in the
saga, The Fiery Cross (working title) is due out in 2001, and
the final book (Sons of Liberty) has no release
date as yet. ABC has recently purchased the rights to Outlander
for a miniseries.
Did
you always know that you would be a writer?
I feel as though
I was meant to write novels. I've known that since I was about
8. I have always had stories going on in my mind. I was 36 when
I first wrote one down, which was Outlander. I always told stories.
My sister, who is three years younger, and I shared a bedroom
til I was 14, and since I was 6 I
began to tell her stories.
The little voices
in my head are always there, whether or not I'm working on a novel.
When you're working on a novel, you try to keep part of your consciousness
focused on it so you'll hear them when they come. It's an effort,
because I will reach points when I've finished a big chunk of
novel, or to a greater extent when I've finished a book,
and it'll stop all of a sudden. There's a sort of feeling of peace
and accomplishment that lasts for two or three days and I don't
hear anything. In those two or three days before the voices come
back I won't feel any obligation to focus my attention on the
book.
But while I am
actually working on a piece, I do have that feeling of needing
to concentrate very hard to listen. It's not that they talk to
you and you write it down. It's that you're actually working with
them.
How
did you get started writing the mixed-genre kind of fiction that
you are known for?
The romance genre has very specific
expectations, and this leads to a great deal of predictability.
It's very rare to find a good romance writer who can work within
that form and still produce a good novel. That's why I try not
to let people refer to my own books as romances. One of the reviews
said one of my books couldn't decide what kind of book it was,
which I considered a sort of a vindication. I was pleased by that.
I originally
intended to write a mystery for practice. But I decided not to,
just because I'd never written a mystery before or any kind of
novel and I had no idea whether I could handle a plot. So I said,
let's write something easier. I decided the easiest thing I could
write would be a historical novel because
I could look things up. So I started Outlander and things got
really out of hand. But when they offered me a contract for the
fourth book, the others were doing quite well, the New York Times
list and all that, I said this may be the only chance I get to
make them let me write a mystery. Partly for
the challenge, and partly from a sense of loyalty, because I read
more mysteries than anything. Also curiosity, I'd always
wanted to write one. and it's a completely
different form from what I had been doing. They wanted book 4
badly enough that they said yes and they gave me a contract for
two mysteries.
Why
did you choose this particular period for your novels?
When
I began writing, I thought a historical novel would be relatively
easy and so I said, where should I set this? I chose Scotland, 18th
century after watching a Doctor Who episode with a cute little
Scottish character. If you really want to write a book, it doesn't
really matter where you set it. The important thing is you should
just pick a place and start in. So I began with no outline, no
plot, no characters, nothing but a time and a place. But I knew
the important thing was to write. Since then I've talked to many
people who are working on or have finished historical novels and
for almost all of them the research is actually a huge block.
Not that it's difficult to do, but they get so entranced with
it they would much rather do research than write. Subsequently
a great many of them never do get anything on paper other than
voluminous notes. I instinctively knew that one ought not to do
that. I had written a dissertation and so forth, I knew what research
is.
Do
you have trouble with procrastination?
I will know there
are certain things that need to be done or should be approached
and I will sit down with the intention of doing them and half
an hour later I'm still playing solitaire. Then with luck, I will
finally get around to doing it. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes the
phone will ring. If you let interruptions stop you, they will.
You have to keep coming back to it. A lot of people I've talked
to say they feel they have failed for the day and may as well
give up. the next day isn't any better,
and eventually they do quit.
How
did you learn to deal with that? To realize
that you couldn't or wouldn't fail?
Part of it in
regards to writing fiction was that I wasn't going to tell anyone
what I was doing. I was writing this book only for practice. My
only motive in doing it was to learn how to write a novel. I never
had the slightest intention of selling it, let alone showing it
to anyone. No audience, consequently there was no real fear of
failure. As long as I succeeded in producing a complete book,
I would have succeeded. I knew I could do that. It might not be
any good, but I could certainly write it.
I saw it as a
necessary learning experience. I'd written enough nonfiction (doctoral
dissertation, scholarly papers, essays, and so forth, as well
as freelance writing for the computer press as a way of earning
extra money) to realize that things get better as you keep doing
them. That you could learn almost anything in terms of writing.
I'd also written comic books for Walt Disney, and though these
were completely different forms, yet with just a little bit of
study, I could pick up what the form was supposed to be and then
apply the craft to it, and there you were.
Having decided
to write a novel, and having selected this time period basically
at random, it seemed to me the only important thing was to get
words on paper. I don't normally write any of the stuff that I
write from the beginning and work straight through. I will pick
up some bit of resonance, I call them a kernel, in terms of fiction
it's a very vivid image or line of dialogue or an emotional ambiance
(in nonfiction it's a striking idea or turn a phrase), but anything
like that that I can put on paper easily, I put that down first.
And then you've got something to stand on when you're working
backwards and forwards. In its own good time, the first sentence
will come along and you can put it where it belongs.
Consequently
I developed a habit of just starting in anywhere where I could
hear or see something. And so I began writing Outlander, in fact,
in the parking lot of the church, I decided during the sermon
to set the book in Scotland.
I dug out a piece of paper from under the front seat of my car,
and I began writing. General phrases, bits of things that I could
conjure up from the very little that I knew about Scotland
at the time, which was almost nothing. It was just disconnected
jottings, but I had words on paper. The next day I began writing
a character, and meanwhile went to the library. Began
writing descriptions. The third day I thought I ought to
have a female character. I knew novels should have conflict. I
knew from the technical writing that ideas spawn ideas, it's the
act of working that creates ideas, not waiting for them.
You
have talked about writing in chunks. How do you do that?
I
find a kernel, then I go on with it.
Eventually I will come up with a plot. As I wrote chunks, I found
that one thing would suggest another, even though it would not
be geographically next to that piece in the finished book. But
thematically or in terms of some other trigger event, it would
be connected. So these pieces began sticking together and forming
a kind of framework. I would get bigger and bigger chunks and
finally I would have a long sequence that ran maybe 150 pages,
and at this point I could see fairly well what was going to happen
next.
Long sequences
connected to each other like continents rising out of the ocean.
First you just see the tips of the islands, the volcanoes coming
up, but then as the whole land mass rises,
the contours become evident. You can see where one valley leads
into the next mountain.
Do
pieces sometimes not fit?
When they don't
fit, they fit somewhere else. I almost never throw anything away.
In fact, when I finish a scene, I'll usually have a collection
of what I call ORTs, little fragments
left over from a feast, the phrases and bits and pieces that I
took out when working on the scene,
I move them to the bottom of the scene. Sometimes I'll go back
and pick one of them up and hook it in somewhere else, or I'll
use them somewhere else.
I keep all the
leftover words. I'm not usually an anal compulsive person at all,
but I won't throw away anything. If you have words on paper, you
can do something with them. I would come to spots and I'd think,
this is kind of a neat thing, maybe
I should save it for the next book, so I'll have enough for the
next book. And invariably I'd say, no, that would be wrong. Use
everything you've got. This book deserves everything you can give
it. Put it all in here. Have faith that something else will come
along, and in fact, it always has.
What
are some of the more challenging scenes you've had to write?
As I got into
writing the novel and became convinced that I did have interesting
people and they spoke to me, you know I could hear them, it came
to me that most of the scenes I'd been doing with people talking
were between two people. I had done three in a row and I had begun
to notice the pattern. So I said well you know you don't want
to have too much of this, this might be monotonous. Thinking back,
I don't see too many scenes in novels in which you have multiple
people talking, it's difficult technically. So I said let me try
and do a mob scene where we have a lot of people in a gathering
where the conversation is kind of general and see how that works.
Can it be done at all and is it something I want to do?
There's
always the very difficult emotional scenes, scenes you hesitate
to write because you do know what happens and you don't want to
live through that. Or because you don't want
to face the technical difficulty of getting a very raw emotion
down on paper. That kind of scene you tend to put off for
several days. I'm not sure if you're working up your nerve or
just letting your subconscious dwell on it. But usually when you
do sit down to write that sort of scene, the writing itself goes
fairly well. It's just the emotion accompanying it is difficult.
Do
you have any advice for writers?
There are no
rules. Beyond that, there are what
I call Gabaldon's three rules for
writing:
1. Read. Read
everything. Read lots. You'll learn to tell the difference between
good and bad and why things work or don't work.
2. Write. The
only thing that matters is getting words on paper. It doesn't
matter if you write the book in a straight line, if you use an
outline, if you write it in little pieces and glue them together.
Even backward. Writing is the only way you'll discover what
works for you. You can't do it by thinking or by reading other
people's stuff.
3. Don't stop.
The only way you can fail at writing is to give up.
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