Diana Gabaldon's Outlander Series
By: Melanie Billings
For years, Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series has baffled bookstore shelf stockers and fans alike. Fans (who sometime refer to the series as simply "The Books") are hard-pressed to define exactly what makes the books so wonderfully addictive. Rather than attempt to describe them, it seems simplier just to hand the first book in the series, Outlander, to someone and say, "Read it. You'll see what I mean.", and then sit back and watch the addiction set in. In fact, many fans own two copies of Outlander for exactly that reason; one to keep and one to loan out.
Bookstores don't know where to place the books. In science fiction? Yes, it certainly qualifies with all the time-traveling. The witchcraft, voodoo and shamans point it towards the fantasy aisle. The series covers the 1745 uprising and the battle of Culloden, early colonial America on the verge of the Revolution, not to mention a richly detailed and exhaustively researched depiction of 18th century Scotland, so perhaps it should go on the historical fiction shelf? Not so fast -- the series centers around the enduring love between Claire and Jamie, so is it romance? Well, not exactly.
So, how do you classify a series of books that centers around the lives of a time-traveling WWII nurse and the man she loves, an 18th century Highlander? The answer is simple. You don't. You simply enjoy them for what they are and pass the addiction along to friends.
Mel: Your work contains numerous aspects of the paranormal, including witchcraft, ghosts, mysticism and even a sighting of the Loch Ness monster. Does the paranormal hold a particular fascination for you personally?
Diana Gabaldon: Oh, yes; but then, I think the notion of the paranormal holds some fascination for nearly everybody, doesn't it? People are generally open to the idea that there's more to the world than merely the visible aspects.
Notice, by the way, that the witchcraft in the books is largely not paranormal, but merely the perception of science by a society unfamiliar with it. Even the appearance of the Loch Ness monster has a theoretically logical explanation (vide Claire's speculation that there might be a time portal beneath the Loch).
One of the methods of inducing a reader to believe in the "unreal," of course, is to immerse them in the details of things which they know--or perceive--to be "real," and then simply proceed to treat the unreal in exactly the same fashion. There is, after all, a substantial overlap of the real and the unreal in our world--and a strong possibility that the unreal is merely the unexplained. Who, after all, would have believed in the existence of germs, prior to Van Leeuwenhoek? And yet bacteria, spirochetes, and viruses were all there, teeming merrily away beyond the ken of mortal man, and having their impact over the ages. The fact that humans are unaware of the truth of a matter doesn't mean that that matter doesn't exist.
People often say to me (in tones of puzzlement), "But how did you get from being a scientist, to being a writer?" or, (in slightly more hopeful tones , "But I suppose you must use your scientific backgbround in the writing?"
Frankly, the answer to the first of those questions is, "Easy. I wrote a book." How else?
The answer to the second is a trifle more complex. I'm not sure what these questioners mean by "using," though I suspect they mean that I must (obviously) already know tons about herbal medicine and antique surgery--in fact, I don't; I do, however, know how to do research. What I do "use" from my scientific background, though, is a sense of constant possibility, and the conviction that the natural world--including human motions--works in terms of patterns, which are discoverable, even if the details remain temporarily unknown.
Mel: In The Outlandish Companion, you state that Claire refused to be anything but a modern-day woman in the 18th century when you first began writing Outlander and time-travel seemed the only logical way to explain her character's actions and reactions. What was the biggest stumbling block you encountered after deciding to write a time-travel novel?
Diana: Well, I'd call it a challenge, rather than a stumbling-block, in terms of writing the book. See, the story arc of a novel is dictated by the motivations of the central character(s). Once Claire was a time-traveler, that naturally altered the premise of her character. For a time-traveler, that ability to exist in a different time-stream must logically be a major defining property; you can't just announce that this person is a time-traveler, and then tell the story without ever taking that fact into account beyond differences of cultural perception and language.
The first question, of course, is: Why is this person in a different time? That is, was it a deliberate choice (ala H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, or Jack Finney's Time and Again), or was it accidental (vide most of the time-travel romances one runs into--they're all called something like ONCE/ALWAYS/NOW/AGAIN/THEN/SOMEDAY/FOREVER--so it's impossible to distinguish them easily)?
See, what happens in a story is dictated by what the main characters want. And a deliberate time traveler is pretty much bound to want something--to change the course of events, or merely to witness an important historical event--while an accidental time-traveler almost certainly wants only one thing: to get back.
In Outlander, of course, Claire's desire to return to Frank forms the main motivation for her actions through at least the first half of the book.
From that point, the story can evolve in all sorts of ways--but the fact of the time-travel is going to be a fulcrum for the story, and will affect both the major storyline and any number of minor details.
Still, as I say, that was merely a challenge--how was this story going to work out, with time-travel as a basic assumption?--rather than a stumbling block.
Where the time-travel did become a stumbling block was in terms of marketing the book(s). See, without that (rather major) element, the Outlander books would be simply historical adventure fiction of the whopping variety--in the same league (or at least the same shelf-space) as James Michener, James Clavell, Wilbur Smith, or Colleen McCullough. So far as the historical events, backgrounds, and details of research are concerned, that's exactly what they are.
Introduce time-travel, though, and all of a sudden you've thrown the booksellers for a loop. Well, a time-travel book--obviously, that must be science fiction! Or maybe fantasy. Except they're not. The time-travel is certainly a major element in the story--but it isn't the focus of attention, as it would be, in the "normal" sort of sf/f novel. It's just an integral part of Claire's character. I.e., enough to get the books bumped out of historical fiction, but iffy grounds for putting them in sf/f.
Marketing stories that don't really fit anywhere has always been the biggest difficulty for my books. Frankly, this is because I never intended to show Outlander to anyone, let alone publish it. Consequently, I paid no attention whatever to genre categories or constraints--and subsequently, find my books in absolutely every section of the bookstores, bar Westerns. (I more or less expect to find the new book, Lord John and the Private Matter, in Gay and Alternate Lifestyles, as well as Mystery (it actually is a perfectly straightforward historical mystery), and alongside the rest of the series in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Fiction, Literature, Historical Fiction, and Romance (though I perceive a bit of cognitive dissonance in that last--given that there not only is no romance in the book, but the main character is a gay man).
Mel: You write from the perspective of several different characters including Claire, Jamie, Brianna and Roger. Whose point of view do you most enjoy telling the story from?
Diana: All of them. Claire's voice is the easiest and most natural for me, but then, I've been talking to her longer than any of the others. All of them have distinct personalities and ways of expression, and they're all very intriguing to explore.
Mel: One of the most intriguing characters in the series is Master Raymond, an enigmatic shaman (and possible fellow time-traveler) whom Jamie and Claire encounter during their travels. Will we see Master Raymond again?
Diana: Well, yes, if I live long enough. That is, I do intend to tell Master Raymond's own story, eventually--but his book(s) are not under contract, and I have no idea when that story will come to the top of my mental heap.
I do get small bits of it bubbling up from the depths every now and then (this happens with all the books I'm working on), and when they do, I go and write them down and stash them--but then return to the book of the moment.
Mel: As you have said yourself, your work defies categorization. If you could simply invent a seperate Genre to categorize your books in, what would it be?
Diana: Well , not to be immodest, --my own publisher pointed out to me that the only good way of surmounting the problem was for the books to do well enough that they were simply called "Bestsellers," and thus displayed on the racks at the front of the store. That seems like a fine solution, to me.
Though I also like the solution proposed by a chain of UK bookstores, a few years back: They put my novels on a special shelf, above a sign reading, "THUMPING GOOD READS!"
Mel: You didn't actually have a chance to visit Scotland until a few years after you wrote Outlander. How did it feel to actually walk in your own character's footsteps? Which location/s had the biggest impact on you and why?
Diana: It was marvelous. Two locations that I can recall having a major impact: the first was Carter's Bar, where one stands at the border between England and Scotland. There's a huge marker stone there, reading "England" on one side, "Scotland" on the other. I have a photograph that my husband took of me, standing under the word "Scotland," and looking out into that green, mysterious place with huge anticipation.
The second, of course, was the battlefield at Culloden. I defy anyone to walk that place unmoved--even people who don't know (as I did) all that happened to bring the men who lie there to that haunted resting place.
Beyond that, walking "in the characters' footsteps" so to speak was a constant delight--everything seemed at once terribly familiar and completely new and intriguing.
Mel: You've often said that you don't write in a "straight line", but rather in bits and pieces and then glue them together into order when you are done. Have you ever gotten confused trying to piece together the mammoth collection of scenes, characters and settings? How do you keep it all in order?
Diana: Uh...no. See, it's all in my head. As I write, the bits and pieces begin to join up logically, and fit into the evolving "shape" of the story. Once they've done that, they don't move--because to me, it's something that's happened.
I often compare the process to 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 and nonexplicit themes of the book like submerged, waiting for someone to dive for them.
You know--it's gradual.
People do often ask how I organize my work: Do I keep extensive notes, or put up detailed timelines on the wall? Do I keep index cards on all the characters? Do I have special organizing software?
Well...the horrid truth is, I am not very organized at all. But since the pieces of the story more or less fit together in my head as they appear, I don't lose them. After all, I'm "living" this story--how could I forget who's who and what they've done? That's like waking up next to your husband and wondering who that is, or forgetting what your living room looks like.
Mel: Given the fact that your novels seem to almost "write themselves" with characters like Claire refusing to act exactly as you want them to, have you ever been in any way surprised at how a particular storyline turns out?
Diana: I'm invariably surprised. Which is a good thing, since otherwise, it probably wouldn't be any fun to write them.
But really, since Claire's initial appearance, I've never really bothered "wanting" the characters to do anything in particular, since I know they aren't going to. About all I can do is put them in some situation; then I just watch and listen, and do my best to write it down.
Mel: Can you tell us a little about your upcoming novel (Fall, 2003), Lord John and the Private Matter? Is there a chance we might see any other familiar faces along with Lord John?
Diana: Well, since that book is now written (and in fact, it's been published already, in Germany), I could tell you absolutely everything about it. That would take awhile, though.
Essentially, the whole thing was an accident--but then, every significant step in my writing career has been, so I don't know why I should be surprised.
See, I thought it was a short story. I was writing this, more or less on the side, in order to add it to a real short story about Lord John (titled Hellfire), which I'd done several years ago for a now-out-of-print British anthology of historical crime stories. I figured with one or two more short stories, written as time and inclination allowed, we'd eventually end up with a collection of Lord John stories long enough to be published in volume form--which would please those readers who'd been asking me for years how to get hold of Hellfire.
Only it turned out to be a book, instead of a short story. Worse--or better, depending on one's viewpoint--the publishers to whom my agents took it really liked it, and asked if I could write more Lord John books. To which I replied--rather stunned--that sure I could; I like Lord John.
So here we are with a contract for three Lord John novels, to go along with the extant and planned Outlander books. As it is, the Lord John books are sort of interpolations in the storyline of the main Jamie and Claire books--adventures that Lord John is having, during those periods of his life in which he's absent from the story covered in the Outlander novels.
So Lord John and the Private Matter takes place in 1757--soon after Lord John has left Jamie Fraser at Helwater as a paroled prisoner of war, and returned to London to rejoin his regiment. As the regiment sets about refurbishing, in anticipation of a new foreign posting, Lord John is landed with an unpleasant assignment; Sergeant O'Connell is dead, and the evidence indicates that he was very likely a traitor. Lord John is the only senior officer above suspicion; he gets the job of finding out how O'Connell died--and why.
But public duty is one thing, and private honor another; Lord John is also the de facto head of his family during his elder brother's absence, and finds himself faced with a dilemma of the utmost delicacy, and the prospect of a scandal that will blight his family.
Among the twisted strands of his twin problems, Lord John finds time for the occasional thought of his erstwhile prisoner, though--if that's what you mean by "other familiar faces."
Mel: If someone (an intrepid time-traveler with a strange sense of humor, perhaps) had told you, while you were studying for your Ph.D. in quantitative behavioral ecology years ago, that in another decade or so you would be the author of a international bestselling series of 900+ page books about a time-traveling WWII nurse in love with a 18th century Scottish Highlander, what do you think you would have said?
Diana: I would have said, "From your mouth to God's ear."
Many thanks to Diana Gabaldon for taking time out of her busy schedule to talk to us!
Online information:
Diana Gabaldon Home Page Find out the latest book signing and tour information, read messages from Diana Gabaldon herself, as well as upcoming book release dates and excerpts.
Lallybroch "A Community for the admirers of the work of Diana Gabaldon" One of the best and most comprehensive sites out there for "Hosers" (see this page to determine if you are, in fact, a "hoser"). Join the very friendly Lallybroch ladies (and a few lads too!) on the message boards where you can find daily quotes from the series, lively discussions, trivia, talk about the upcoming Outlander books, and even a Literary board to exercise your own writing talents. Almost as addictive as The Books themselves!
My Outlandish Thing A Salon.com article by a man who's not ashamed to admit his love for Outlander.