Hugendubel Bookstore Chain Interview, September 2005

Interview for a magazine published by the Hugendubel bookstore chain, in Germany.

1) Ms. Gabaldon, ten years ago your book Outlander has been published in Germany, the first part of the big Highland-Saga. Millions of readers were keen to follow the traces of Clan-leader Jamie Fraser and his wife Claire, first in the Highlands, later also in the New World America. Was there any feedback from Germany that you considered to be especially delightful?

Well, I suppose you’d call it feedback...there is a group of readers from a website called “Steffi’s Bucherkist” (you must pardon my German, which is execrable), who met me at a booksigning during the last German tour. They had all had lovely dark-red T-shirts printed up, each with the Fraser clan crest on the bosom, and with different quotations from the books printed below. [g] I thought that was most delightful-especially when they gave me a shirt of my own.

2) When and where were you exactly when you had the idea of time travel back into 18. centurys Scotland and the Highlands?

Oddly enough, I know that. I was in church. [g] And it must have been the first Sunday of March, 1988. I had already made up my mind to write a historical novel as my “practice” book (I didn’t intend to show it to anyone; only to use it to learn how to write a novel), and was just considering times and places in which I might set such a novel.

Well, the day before, I had watched a very old television show-an ancient re-run of Dr. Who, which is a British fantasy show, in which the Doctor of the title, a Time-Lord from the planet Gallifrey, travels through space and time having adventures, and along the way, picks up “companions” from various periods of Earth’s history. In this particular show, he had a young Scotsman, whom he had picked up in 1745-a cute young man who appeared in his kilt. “Well, that’s rather attractive,” I thought-and was still thinking so during the sermon in church the next day. [g]

“Well,” I said to myself, with a mental shrug, “you want to write a book, and one historical period is as good as the next; you’ll have to research everything anyway. Fine, Scotland, 18th century.” So I went out to my car after Mass, dug a piece of scrap paper out from under the seat, and began to jot down a few disconnected phrases conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt.

Now, despite the Dr. Who connection, this book had nothing to do with time-travel at that point; it was a perfectly straight-forward historical novel. But within the first few days of writing, I came to the conclusion that-while I must have a lot of Scotsmen, because of the kilt factor-I should really have a main female character as well, to create an extra layer of conflict and sexual tension in the story. So-given that I had now decided to use the Jacobite Rising of 1745 as the historical background for the book-I thought that if I made her an Englishwoman, we would have lots of conflict! [g]

So I created an Englishwoman-no idea who she was, or how she got into the story-and loosed her into a cottage full of Scotsmen, to see what she’s do. She walked in, they all stared at her-then one rose slowly to his feet. “I’m Dougal MacKenzie,” he said, in a deep, gruff voice, “And who might you be?”

And without my stopping to think much about it, I typed: “My name’s Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?” “Hmmm,” I said, looking at this. “You don’t sound at all like a historical person!” So I fought with her for several pages-trying to beat her into shape, and make her talk like an 18th-century woman-but nothing doing. She just kept making smart-ass modern remarks-and she also took over and started telling the story herself.

“Fine,” I said to her. “No one’s ever going to read this book; it doesn’t matter what bizarre thing I do. Go ahead and be modern; I’ll figure out how you got there later.” So it’s all Claire’s fault that there is time-travel in these books. [g]

3) 1743 - 1772: Nearly 30 years, six volumes and 5000 pages of fighting for freedom, traditions, honesty, of dealing with love and guilt. Has it been a curse or a blessing for you to do a major literary project like this?

It’s been great. I have all the room I want, in which to explore absolutely anything, in any way I want to. Few authors are so blessed. [smile]

So, I’m telling the story of an entire marriage (rather than the simple courtship stories of romance novels), a family saga, a wild adventure-story, ghost stories, murder mysteries, explorations of sexual psychology, variants, and aberrations, explorations of mysticism and religious feeling, speculative theories of time-travel (I was actually invited to write up the Gabaldon Theory of Time-Travel for The Journal of Transfigural Mathematics, published in Berlin [g])-and along the way, I’m dealing with tribal cultures (both the Scottish clans and the North American Indians), political intrigue, the rise of democracy, the fall of monarchy, the spread of the Enlightenment, and the major geopolitical developments of the whole second half of the eighteenth century. Oh, and the Loch Ness monster, to be sure.

People often ask me which book of the series is my favorite. To me, it’s all one Enormous Story. Still, the individual volumes are very carefully engineered, so that each book will stand alone, with it’s own particular structure, atmosphere, and approach-and at the same time, will fit into the very intricate and complex structure of the series as a whole.

If I have to choose a single volume, though-it’s always either the book I’m presently working on (because it’s the one where I don’t yet know everything that happens), or the one I’ve just finished (because I like to feel that I’m getting better with practice. [g]). So right now, it’s Ein Hauch von Schnee und Asche.

4) Did you want to write just one novel originally or several?

Well, originally, I intended to write a mystery novel. But then I thought I’d best write something easier first, for practice, and here we are!

I don’t outline books before I write them, nor do I do any specific planning. I do know a few things about a book-a few events (large and small) that will happen. But I don’t know how they’ll happen, nor yet when. I find that out (and a lot of other things) while I’m working.

I write in small bits and pieces, and as I work on a book-writing and researching and thinking-these pieces begin to cohere. As they begin to stick together and form larger, more interesting shapes, I gradually realize what the overall “shape” of the book is (each volume has its own specific shape-usually expressible as a geometric shape of some kind. Outlander (Feuer und Stein), for instance, is three overlapping triangles. The second book is in the shape of a dumbbell-two large, rounded arcs (the first half of the story, set in France, that describes the political intrigue and adventure leading up to the Jacobite Rebllion, and the second half, dealing with the Rebellion itself), separated by a flat “bar” (a section of domestic tranquility at the Highland estate, Lallybroch, in contrast to the tumult and upheaval of the two arcs), and with a smaller, rounded fasterning piece on each end (a brief framing story that provides the backstory connections with the previous book and has a Most Surprising plot development of its own).

The new book, Ein Hauch von Schnee und Asche, is shaped like a wave. A very particular wave. I was describing it to my literary agent, and said, “You know that famous Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai, called “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”? You see it all the time, on stationery, postcards, posters, and calendars.” He said he did, and I went on, “Well, the book looks just like that....only there are two of them.”

I’ve given the manuscript to a few friends to read; invariably they come back to me in the middle, hyperventilating and saying, “Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmyGOD!” To which I reply, “Ah, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Just wait.”

But the point here is that all this emerges very slowly, as I write. So I never know at the beginning of a book just how much territory (physical, geographical, political and emotional) the book will cover. Consequently, I’ve often been working for a year or two (it takes me 2-3 years to write one of these very big books, owing to the length, the complexity, and the sheer amount of research and information required. Also, I’m very slow) before I have a real idea of how far I’m going to get, in terms of the historical timeline and the emotional lives of the characters. So all I said to my agent in the beginning was, “Here’s the manuscript; I thought I should stop while I could still lift it. But there is more to the story-if anyone’s interested.”

Luckily, they were.

5) To what extent have your characters become companions in your life?

Well, I’ve always had “voices” (so to speak) in my head, and small flashes of fictional characters. If there’s nothing going on in the back of my head (and that’s very rare), I tend to feel quite odd-sort of incomplete, or disconnected.

It isn’t that I constantly think of the main characters of this series-there are a lot of people living in my head . But there usually is someone “with” me, so to speak, though they may not be articulate, and I may have no more than a faint sense of who they are and what they’re doing.

6) Your scenes give the impression of being very close to real life, the reader considers himself to be part of the story. Do you have a plan or do you write the scenes as they come to your mind?

Well, I don’t have a plan, let’s put it that way. What I need to begin writing on any given day is what I call a “kernel.” This might be a vivid image (an object, a landscape, a room), a line of dialogue, a distinct emotional ambience...anything that I can sense clearly.

I then write down this kernel, as clearly and elegantly as I can. Then I stare at the sentence or two on the page. Then I take out a couple of words. Add a clause. Write a new sentence. Take the clause off the first sentence and add it to the second. Decide I no longer like the first sentence and delete it and replace it with another. I fiddle. (I have no idea how to translate that word into German. It doesn’t mean playing the violin, but rather implies a process of moving things around, almost at random, like a child playing with blocks.)

Anyway, as I’m doing this fiddling with the mechanical nuts and bolts of the writing, stuff is happening in the back of my mind. I’m not voicing questions explicitly, but they’re happening-this object I’m describing-who’s looking at it? Are they holding it? Is someone else holding it? Where are these people? What did that person just say about it? No, he didn’t-someone else has come in and interrupted with some news...

Well, look. The best metaphor I’ve come up with for describing what I do when I write is raising continents.

When you begin, there’s nothing but a trackless sea, stretching to the horizon. But wait! Out in the distance, an undersea volcano begins to spray smoke and cinders! Then another--and another!

As the lava rolls down the sides of the volcanoes, hissing into the sea, huge clouds of steam rise up, making clouds and temporarily obscuring things--but as the steam and rain begin to clear, you see the islands forming around these volcanoes--atoll, lagoons, islets...the mountains grow taller, the islands enlarge--and as the land rises and the water falls away, you begin to see the shape of the continent beneath. The slope of one volcano flows down into the water--and another rises over there...so you can deduce what the hidden land between them looks like, under the water.

When the whole job is done, you’re left with mountain ranges of conflict and excitement, and valleys of restful lyricism. Small lakes and bodies of water remain in the hollows--those are the depths where the symbolism, the moral ambiguities, and the nonexplicit themes of the book lie submerged, waiting for someone to dive for them. And when the reader leans over to look into these watery mysteries...he should see himself in the reflection.

7) You mix together historical facts and fiction and get out entertainment that is never boring. Where do you get your inspiration from?

Everywhere. I imagine all writers do; certainly all the good ones do. The stuff of daily life provides you with the observations that make characters and situations vivid and real; plot ideas...goodness, you can get dozens of them from reading a single issue of the newspaper. As for picturesque situations and details-those come from anything at all: objects seen in a museum, conversations overheard while shopping, the sight of paper-wasps building a nest in a garden fence.

I think perhaps, though, most people don’t realize that books don’t come from “inspiration.” They come from work. Inspiration just gives you a brief and fragile foothold on the tightrope that you walk across the abyss of your subconscious.

8) You work as a professor of zoology and marine-biology and besides that you are also one of the best-known writers in the world. How do you explain this “double-life”?

Well, that’s a little misleading. Actually, I retired from working at the university in 1992; that’s when my second book was just about finished, and also when my contract with the university came up for renewal. As I said to my husband at the time, “We won’t starve if I quit-and it would be nice to see what it’s like to sleep for more than four hours at a time.”

In fact, though, all writers do live a double-life-and sometimes a triple one. The first life is the same as anyone’s: your family, your job, your friends, your hobbies and pleasures, your chores, your religious feelings, the daily bread of your existence. That’s largely an outer-directed life.

The second life is an inner life. Getting words on paper is a solitary profession; it takes concentration and discipline and a few other interesting skills that aren’t conducive to happy family life. Before a writer achieves validation by being published (and, we hope, paid ), his or her spouse and family will almost certainly see what s/he’s doing as a waste of time, and will resent the time spent “scribbling” and away from them.

I know a lot of writers who can’t “find the time” to write-they allow their first life to dominate them, and can’t construct the walls of that necessary inner world where the words take shape. And I also know a lot of writers who did succeed in writing and publishing-but couldn’t balance the demands of their imaginary world with their real one, and ended up divorced and isolated, without a family or important social connections.

To balance these two lives is always a struggle. But then-if you are lucky enough to write a book, sell it, and get it published...you get a third life.

That’s the public life of an author. Suddenly, people want to look at you. Or hear you talk. Or ask you questions about how you work and what you do. [cough] And this all takes time. In the beginning, maybe, not so much-though a brand-new author often has to do a great deal of work in order simply to be noticed here and there, to have a chance to have a book looked at. If one is fortunate enough to become famous, though...well, let’s put it this way. Germany has the world premiere of the new book, A Breath of Snow and Ashes (Ein Hauch von Schnee und Asche), but it will be out three weeks later in the English-speaking world. This means that all hell breaks loose on Sept. 10, when I leave home to fly to Germany.

I’ll do a quick tour in Germany (with events in Munich, Bonn, Hamburg, and Berlin), then fly home in time for the National Book Festival in Washington, DC-then home to Arizona, where I’ll spend the 26th of September signing hundreds of mail-order copies of the book, before signing hundreds more in person the next day at the launch party for the US publication. On the 28th, I leave for Kentucky, Tennessee, Denver....ten US cities, followed by the western Canadian cities (Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton), with a brief stop for the Surrey International Writers Conference (in Surrey, British Columbia), before flying all the way to Halifax and working my way back across the eastern half of Canada.

In short, I’ll be gone (essentially) from September 10 to November 1. During which time, I will see my husband for perhaps 48 hours here and there, and will almost certainly not be able to write very much (a book-touring day usually starts around 4 AM, when you get up to go to the airport to fly to a new city, and ends around 11 PM or midnight, when you stagger back to your hotel after an evening event). And prior to this (and after it), I’ll be doing an ever-increasing number of interviews-by phone, email, and in person-spending time updating my website, answering fan mail, signing bookplates...

In short, this third life can easily engulf-and destroy-- both your other lives-if you let it.

9) Do you use your knowledge of science in your writing?

Sure. I use my knowledge-such as it is-of everything in my writing. How not?

If you’re looking for specific instances...well, I was a field ecologist for some time; I know what a forest is like, what birds are likely to be doing what when, the sorts of plants that might be growing, that sort of thing. And I did teach a course called “Human Anatomy and Physiology” repeatedly, even though it had nothing to do with my own research interests-that’s where I got the broad but shallow grasp of clinical medicine that’s the basis of Claire’s knowledge. For details and advanced procedures, of course, I do research to find what I need.

10) As a child you were convinced you would become writer - what made you believe this?

I don’t know. It was just something I knew about myself-that I should be a writer, at least; I had no idea how I was to do that. But if you ask someone who’s gay, for instance, how they knew this, they’ll invariably reply that it’s just something they’ve always known, whether the realization came upon them suddenly or quite gradually. I can only assume that for some people, they’re born with a calling toward something-whatever that may be.

When this happens, I think it’s a great blessing. I don’t recall which artist said it, but I recall reading a quote from some well-known artist who said, “Really, I’m very lucky. I can do nothing but paint.”

11) At the start of your career you had to look after your three children during the day. How did you manage to continue writing?

Well, the same way you do anything when you have three small children-in small pieces, whenever you can.

It probably helped that my biorhythm is nocturnal; my mind is clearest late at night. So I would always write late at night, when the kids were in bed. During the day...well, when they were babies, I took each one with me to work at the university, until they got old enough to crawl around and pull things down on themselves. Then I’d work at home two days a week, and have a housekeeper for the other three days, who watched the kid(s) too young for school, and kept the house from sliding altogether into chaos. (People used to ask me how I wrote anything, with small children around. I’d answer, “I don’t sleep, and I don’t do housework.”)

12) You placed your first novel as basis for a discussion-forum on the internet. What advantage did this have?

Well, that too is a bit misleading. As part of my job at the university, I had developed an expertise in scientific and technical computation (using computers for scientific purposes; not the same thing as computer science, which deals with the nature and evolution of computers), and later, I used this expertise to develop a secondary career, writing free-lance articles and software reviews for the computer press (the big magazines like BYTE and InfoWorld, for example.).

One day, BYTE sent me a new software package to review, and with it, a trial membership to Compuserve (which was then the biggest of the online services. Mind, this was the mid-80’s; America Online didn’t exist, no one had heard of chat rooms, and Google wasn’t even thought of). “The software you’re reviewing has a support forum on Compuserve,” the accompanying note read, “so we’d like you to go online and check it out, then mention it in the review.”

This seemed reasonable, and so I did. Once I’d checked out the support forum for the software, though, I had a few free hours of connect time left, and so decided to poke around and see what else might be available inside Compuserve. And lo and behold, I discovered the Literary Forum, which was a group of people who liked books. There were a few published authors there, a good many developing writers in various stages of their careers, and a great many people who didn’t write-but loved books, and talking about them. Well, for someone with two full-time jobs and three small children, this was the ideal social life. So I began logging on several times a day, as a break from my work, leaving and answering messages with a lot of very intelligent, interesting people (as I say, this was before the idea of chat rooms. All messages were-and still are-done bulletin-board style; they’re addressed to a specific person, but anyone who likes can join a conversation).

Well, I had been hanging around the Literary Forum for more than a year, when I finally decided that if I wanted to write novels, perhaps I’d better try. Now, I was not going to tell the people that I knew online what I was doing. I didn’t tell anybody, including my husband.

But some eight or nine months into the writing, I found myself one night having an argument with a gentleman named Bill Garland, about what it feels like to be pregnant. (We were both working late, logging in every half-hour or so to check for new messages, so it was a sporadic conversation that just developed that way.)

“Oh, I know what that’s like,” Bill wrote. “My wife’s had three children.”

I laughed-electronically-and said, “Yeah, buster-- I’ve had three children!” So he asked me to tell him what it was like. I answered that it was a complex subject, too big to explain in a single 30-line message slot-but that I had written a...thing a few months back, in which a young woman tells her brother in some detail what it’s like to be pregnant. “I’ll post it in the library, ” I told him, “and you can read it.”

So I did-and all the people who had been following our argument went and read this piece. And they all came rushing back saying, “This is great-what is it?” “I don’t know,” I replied, shrugging. “Well...where’s the beginning?” “I haven’t written that yet.” “Well...put up some more of it! This is cool!”

So, with this kind encouragement, I did. As I noted elsewhere, I don’t write in a straight line-and in fact, I don’t have anything that even looks like chapters, until quite late in the process. But whenever I had 5 or 10 pages that seemed as though they would stand alone, without a lot of explanation, I’d post these bits in the LitForum library. (So no, I was not posting “the novel”-just random bits and pieces-and I was not looking for critiques of the writing (I don’t usually let anyone read anything, unless I’m sure it’s as good as I can make it, and generally ready for public consumption), or anything else. I was letting a few friends read random bits, because they asked to see them-that’s all.)

But, over time, more and more people started reading my “chunks,” as they called them. And more and more people began to say to me, “This is great! You should try and publish it!”

“Well...I wasn’t planning to publish it,” I said. “I don’t even know what kind of book it is; I’m just writing it for practice. But-for the sake of argument, since I do eventually want to publish a book-what should I do?”

Well, the professional, published authors I knew all said, “Get an agent.” They were very kind about offering advice, and I went about the job of researching literary agents-slowly, as I was still working on the book-and began to zero in on one particular agent, named Perry Knowlton. This man wasn’t afraid of long books, nor of unorthodox books-both of which, it occurred me, I had.

However, Perry was a very well-known and long-established agent, with many bestselling authors on his client list; he didn’t take unsolicited query letters. Still, I wasn’t finished with the book, either. I decided simply to go on asking questions and researching; either I’d find another suitable agent, or I’d figure out how to approach Mr. Knowlton.

So, a few months later, I found myself talking to an online Forum friend named John Stith, who writes sf/mysteries. Since I was asking all the published authors I knew about their agents, I asked John-who (to my surprise) replied, “Yes, I have an agent-his name’s Perry Knowlton. I know you’re almost ready to look for an agent; would you like me to introduce you to Perry?”

“Well...yes, John,” I said, gulping. “That would be real nice of you!” I was afraid that John might leave Compuserve or be run over by a bus before he could talk to Perry, so I told him please to go ahead-in spite of the fact that I wasn’t finished writing the book. So he sent a note to Perry, essentially just saying that I was worth looking at.

I followed this with my own query letter to Mr. Knowlton, explaining that I’d been selling nonfiction for some time on my own-but that now that I was writing a novel, I understood that I needed good literary representation, and he’d been recommended to me by John and a few other friends whose opinions I respected....“I have this very long historical novel,” I wrote. “I don’t want to waste too much of your time; would you be willing to read excerpts from it?” (I didn’t tell I wasn’t through writing it; excerpts were all I had.)

Anyway, Perry kindly called back and said yes, he’d read my excerpts. I hastily wrote up a 26-page synopsis and sent that with a pile of excerpts-and he agreed to represent me, on the basis of an unfinished first novel-which is very unusual, and very lucky!

Well, so. I finally did finish writing the book some six months later, at which point Perry sent the manuscript to five editors whom he thought might like it-and within four days, three of them had called back with offers to buy it. So he negotiated among them, and emerged two weeks later with a three-book contract-and bing! I was an author.

So that’s the story of my literary involvement with Compuserve. I still hang around with the friends I have there, though the group is now renamed as the Compuserve Books and Writers Community, and is now free access, rather than a paid membership sort of thing. The web URL is “community.compuserve.com/Books,” (no “www”) in case anyone would like to drop by. (We have a special Section called the “Non-English” section, for those people whose first language is not English---but in fact, almost the entire population who visits that section is German!) There are a number of different sections within the Books and Writers site-I “run” the section called “Research and Craft,” as well as the “Diana Gabaldon” section, where people are welcome to come and ask questions about and/or discuss my books.

13) Let’s return to Jamie and Claire: In the recently published sixth volume the situation in the colonies is coming to a head and Jamie has to take on a different task. Will any really bad things happen there and how many volumes of the story can readers expect?

Will any really bad things happen there? [laugh] You’ve read my other books and you can ask that?

It’s the beginning of a war-I think we can be reasonably sure that bad things will happen, yes. But it isn’t what happens that matters; it’s what people do about what happens.

As for how many volumes...well, certainly one more after Ein Hauch von Schnee und Asche-possibly two-but I won’t know how many until I’ve been working on the next book for a year or so, and developed some idea of how much territory I’ll be covering. As I told my husband, “It took me two and a half books to deal with the Jacobite Rising, which was a six-month war with three battles. I have to get all the way through the American Revolution now-and that was a little more complex!”

14) For your readers it is breathtaking to think of the year 1776 because this is the year the death of the Frasers is predicted. Can you put your reader’s minds at rest?

If I could, I wouldn’t. What fun would it be to read a book in which you already knew the outcome?

When people recently asked my German translator (the excellent and delightful Barbara Schnell) for hints about the book, though, she replied, “OK, I’ll give you a hint. Do not read the last pages first!” (And a note to those readers who may want to leave online reviews about the book-there are a lot of Big Surprises in this book, and I’m sure that everyone will want to be surprised by them. So if you do feel that you must give things away when talking about the book, do please put a “SPOILER” notice on your message? Thank you!)

15) In our magazine it is a tradition to ask every writer for four or five books that he or she recently enjoyed reading or found insightful. So what recommendations do you have for our readers?

Oh, my. I read all the time, and enjoy most of it, philosophical insights aside. Let me see...

Just recently, I’ve read Reginald Hill’s latest book, The Stranger House. I always enjoy Hill; he has a marvelous way with both character and setting, and like the best novels, manages both entertainment and social commentary without beating the reader over the head with it.

Then there’s a lovely romance novel, set in the American Civil War, titled Seen by Moonlight, by Kathleen Eschenberg. Lyrical, moving, and very well grounded in the historical period. And I read Janet Evanovich’s latest, Eleven on Top, last night-a fast, funny read.

And at the moment, I’ve just started Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian, which looks interesting, though I also have several nonfiction books going for research. Those include The Military Experience in the Age of Reason (background for the next Lord John novel-Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, which I hope to finish around the middle of next year), Blue Blood, by Edward Conlon (a true-life police memoir; background for the contemporary mystery novel I’m also working on) and A Gallant Defense (about the siege of Charleston, during the American Revolution).