When Braveheart met Dr Who, global success was only a matter of time travel
Her Outlander adventures are hugely popular, but with a new novel and a sixth TV series coming up, Diana Gabaldon reveals how it all started as a secret experiment
IT’S the TV fantasy series credited with boosting Scottish tourism by 72 per cent as fans flocked from all over the world to enjoy its dramatic locations. The hugely popular Outlander drama features a Second World War nurse who is transported back to the Highlands of the 1740s, during the time of the Jacobean rising, where she falls in love with a dashing Braveheart-style warrior.
The eagerly awaited sixth season starts in March. But astonishingly, this passionate time-travelling tale of love and war across the centuries was written by an American science research professor who had never set foot in Scotland. Now Diana Gabaldon has just published the ninth book in her series at the age of 69.
Her fantasy novels, on which Outlander is based, have sold 45 million copies in 38 languages. It’s a project Diana began in secret. At the time she was a young mother with a highly successful career as an academic and science writer.
She had three degrees and was the founding editor of a quarterly science software journal. But she could never shake the feeling she had had since childhood that she was destined to be a novelist.
Eventually she decided to give fiction a try, but only as a “test case” to see what was involved.
“Writing a novel was essentially a learning project,” she says. “I needed to see the daily commitment; what it is like to carry a novel around in your head. I thought the easiest kind to write would be historical fiction.”
She was in her mid-thirties when she embarked on her 650-page debut novel. It took her 18 months. Writing in secret at night, while her three young children were asleep, Diana didn’t even tell her businessman husband Doug Watkins what she was up to.
“I’d known I was meant to be a novelist from the age of eight, but my father told me I was such a poor judge of character that I was bound to marry a bum, so I followed a different path and went into academic science instead.”
She only told Doug that she was writing a novel after he used their shared computer and discovered numerous, mysterious files named “Jamie”.
Jamie Fraser is the dashing 18th century Highland warrior, played by Scottish actor Sam Heughan in the TV adaptation. Diana created the character after watching an old episode of Doctor Who featuring a Scots warrior in a kilt. “I didn’t tell my husband what I was doing,” she says. “My grip on this was tenuous enough, but he discovered it by accident. In our garage was an IBM XP which he would use in the
late 1980s to draw up contracts. One day, when he pressed the directory key, up came 80 files all labelled Jamie.
“Who is Jamie?” Doug asked, not unreasonably.
“It’s this book I’m writing”, replied Diana. “At this point, I had been successfully doing this without diverting attention away from the children, so he got quite interested and started cheerleading for me and became my first reader.”
THIRTY years on, it seems her legions of fans can’t get enough of the genrebusting romantic adventure novels, and the ninth in the series, Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone, has just been published, running to 900 pages. This one has been seven years in the writing.
And it’s clear Doug never had any need to be jealous of his wife’s strapping fictional hero, because, confides Diana, the epic love story between Jamie and nurse Claire Beauchamp (played by Caitriona Balfe on TV) is based in part on her relationship with Doug. They have been married for 45 years and live in Arizona.
“Doug is the love of my life and there are bits of him in Jamie,” she says. “We have an eternal relationship like Jamie and Claire. Ours spans decades, whereas it was centuries with them.
“I am often asked if I could travel through the [time travelling] stones in my novels which time period I would like to end up in. And my answer is always the
‘My father told me I was such a poor judge of character that I was bound to marry a bum’
‘Writing is done at walking pace; just 1,000 words a day. Keep doing it and you eventually get there’
same – I’m happy being here with Doug.” Talking to Diana, who is also a consultant on the TV adaptations of her novels and who admits she is “drawn to complexity”, is a bit like downloading information from a hard-drive.
Her mind is like a computer, enabling her to intellectually multi-task. She doesn’t so much reflect on a question as access replies in a millisecond, spilling insights at breakneck speed.
Here is a typical example. Asked how she plots her intricate novels, she replies: “You know how a kaleidoscope works? A tube with two or three rectangular mirrors in it, orientated at angles, which make multiple symmetric reflections of whatever coloured objects you put at the front end of the tube?
“Well, imagine that I have a three-mirrored kaleidoscope. One mirror is the historical plane of reflection – the events, the timeline, the physical settings. The second is the plane of reflection that concerns the characters – who they are, their motivations, their personal histories.
“And the third is my own plane of reflection – the background, experiences, perceptions, and personality that make me unique.
“So, say I have a handful of these disparate scenes. Placed in the space formed by my three mirrors, they form patterns.And if I rotate the tube – so to speak – this causes the pieces inside to fall into a different relationship to each other, and I see different patterns.
“Some patterns are naturally more pleasing than others, and I use the ones that seem most aesthetically logical.” She says that hearing about this style of creative process has a tendency to infuriate people who write in a more traditional, linear way.
“I once had a woman inform me that I couldn’t possibly do this, because – in her words – ‘You have to have a logical foundation! You can’t put the roof on your building unless you’ve built solid walls to hold it up, can you?’
“‘Of course I can’,” I replied. “‘There’s no gravity in the mind, after all. I can make the roof and just leave it hanging there until I have time to build walls under it. You don’t have to write a book from beginning to end, just because that’s how people will read it.’ She wasn’t pleased. But the point here is that people’s minds are wired up differently.” Despite her father’s advice, she says she was “fairly confident about writing”.
“I don’t understand people who do themselves down – it’s not productive or helpful. I could tell what I was doing was good because as a scientist I am objective and was able to stand back and see.” Until the age of 14, she shared a bedroom with her younger sister and the girls would tell interactive stories together, “set in one universe or another”. Diana says that although people can be taught how to write better, she’s not sure you can teach someone how to create stories.
Her father was a state senator with Mexican ancestry; her mother taught her to read when she was three.
“And I never stopped. I realised that writers have no secrets; it’s right there on the page and you only have to learn to read to see its secrets – to see patterns and what each writer was doing differently.” But she describes writing as slow and tedious work.
“Both sides of my brain work together, but I let it evolve slowly under my fingers, like polishing gems. I’ll hear a line of dialogue and fiddle with it, accessing the deeper part of my brain while the logical part is analysing the structure of what I’m doing.
“It’s done at a walking pace; just 1,000 words a day. If you keep doing it you eventually get there.”
HER success has bought a larger house and university educations for her children, but she says these changes in lifestyle were gradual. “The money is good to have but we didn’t become rich until the children were out of college.”
She now gives away significant sums through her charitable foundation, prioritising the hungry, the homeless and a chain of non-profit orphanages in South America.
She has a contract for book 10 and reveals that this will be followed by a prequel.
“There could be more to follow – assuming I’m still alive after book 10,” she laughs.
●●Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon (Century, £20) is out now. For free UK P&P, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or order via expressbookshop.com