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Publishing InformationOutlander SeriesOutlander (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 SeriesLord 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 SeriesRed 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)
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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 :
[li]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
[/li][li]She didn't want to have to go into her future to write Claire's future.]
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 thingy 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.[/li][/ul]
