This interview originally appeared in First Draft, the newsletter of the Sisters in Crime Guppies Chapter.

Diana Gabaldon was a research professor at Arizona State University's Center for Environmental Studies when she decided to try writing a novel just to see whether she could do it. Friends encouraged her to seek an agent and market the novel. She did, and Outlander launched a bestselling series about the lives of Claire, a 20th century English nurse who walks through standing stones and emerges in 18th century Scotland, and Jamie Fraser, the clan leader she falls in love with. In 2003 Gabaldon made a sleuth of a minor Outlander character when she added a mystery, Lord John and the Private Matter, to her publishing credits. Recently she answered my questions about her writing for First Draft.


Q.You've had the kind of success most writers can only daydream about with your Outlander series. Why did you decide to try mystery writing too?

A. Well, two things there: 1) I was originally intending to write a mystery. Then I thought, "No, mysteries have plots. I'm not sure I can do that." So I decided to write something easier first. 2) I wasn't actually intending the Lord John stories to be mysteries; they just came out that way. After the first one, I mean. That sort of had to be a mystery, because Maxim Jakubowski invited me to write a short story (ha) for Past Poisons: An Ellis Peters Memorial Anthology of Historical Crime. That's how the whole Lord John thing started; I thought it would be an interesting technical challenge to see if I could write something shorter than 300,000 words.


Q. You already knew Lord John well from the Outlander books. What qualities did you see in him that made you think he would be a good sleuth?

A. I really wasn't thinking of him in those terms. I was invited to write a short story of historical crime, as I say. Upon contemplation, I decided it would have to be set in the 18th century, since that was the period I knew well, and it seemed too time-consuming to research a completely different period for a short story. The obvious next step, of course, would have been to use some of the characters from my Outlander novels for this story as well.

I didn't want to use any of the main characters, though, because I didn't want to risk creating potential plot complications and events that I'd later have to deal with in the context of a future novel (all my novels are interlinked to a large degree).

However....Lord John is an interesting person, who talks to me easily -- and while he's an important character in the main novels, he's also a minor character, who appears only intermittently. Obviously, he was still leading an interesting life when offstage from the main storyline. So why not select a small piece of his offstage life in which to set this story?

So that's what I did. Looking at Lord John in the terms you suggest, though, it's obvious that he does indeed have many qualities that would make him good at solving mysteries. He's intelligent, and very well educated, in a classic 18th-century manner. That style of education placed great emphasis on rationality and observation, both good qualities for a sleuth. Reasoning from observation to deduction would come naturally to him.

Beyond that, he's both a member of the aristocracy, and a career soldier. The dynamics of aristocratic society require delicacy of observation, the capacity to associate easily (and thus the ability to ask nosy questions), and a good memory. As a soldier, he has access to the lower levels of society as well as the higher ones, some entrée to political and military circles, and a manner of command that may get him results when flattery and social chit-chat won't. He can essentially go anywhere.

And beyond all these engaging and useful qualities...the man is homosexual, in a time when that particular proclivity was a capital crime. A gay man has to be very observant, even in modern life. If only five or so percent of the population shares your proclivities, and the majority are grossly intolerant of your orientation -- to the point that if discovered, you risk not only disgrace but physical punishment or death....you'd better be very good at sussing out other people.


Q. Do you read a lot of mysteries? Who are some of your favorite mystery authors?

A. I read a lot of everything. But yes, tons of mysteries. Consequently, I have dozens of favorite authors. The most recent is Bill James, whose Harpur and Iles mysteries are unique (and vastly entertaining) in their moral view of the relations between policemen and criminals.

Owen Parry's Civil War mysteries with Abel Jones are marvelous -- I have a particular weakness for series, obviously -- as are Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus novels. Sharyn McCrumb's ballad novels are marvelous, though they range from mystery to history, and the emphasis is not always on the former, but that's irrelevant to me; I read for character and complexity, and don't care at all about genre constraints or expectations (rather obviously, given what I write!).

Oh, and Reginald Hill is a huge favorite. The evolution of Dalziel and Pascoe -- to say nothing of the thematic depth and wonderful language -- is remarkable. And then there's P.F. Chisholm (aka Patricia Finney), whose Robert Carey mysteries are both historical and hilarious, and whose Elizabethan trilogy (Firedrake's Eye, Unicorn's Blood, and Gloriana's Torch) are just amazing. And then...er...well, like I said, I have lots of favorites.

I really must mention Don Winslow's California Fire and Life, and The Power of the Dog, though. Never seen research used to such striking effect, and the writing and plotting are breathtaking. Uniquely powerful books -- though definitely not for the weak of stomach.


Q. You've said that you wrote Outlander as a "practice" book, to see if you could produce a novel. How did you come up with the idea of a romantic historical adventure story with a time-traveling heroine?

A. It was all the fault of the main narrator. Having decided (on the basis of seeing a fetching young man in a kilt on an ancient rerun of "Dr. Who") to set the book in Scotland in the 18th century, and hastily decamping to the library to look up said period (about which I knew nothing), I had a situation in which we essentially had the mostly Scottish Jacobites pitted against the mostly English Hanoverians.

"Well, fine," I said. "Clearly, I must have a lot of Scotsmen, because of the kilt factor, but I think it would be a good idea to have a female character to play off these guys -- sexual tension, that's conflict, that's good. All I knew about writing novels at the time was that you should have conflict. Come to think of it, that's still the major thing I know about writing novels..."

Anyway, I thought we'd have maximal conflict if I made this person an Englishwoman, and so -- about the third day of writing -- I introduced this Englishwoman, with no notion who she was, what she was doing in the story, or how she'd got there. I loosed her into a cottage full of Scotsmen to see what she'd do.

She walked in, a lot of Scotsmen were huddled round the hearth, muttering to each other, and they turn round and stare at her. Why? I wondered. Does she look funny? Can they tell she's English by her appearance?

The chief of these men stands slowly up and says, "I'm Dougal MacKenzie. And who might you be?" To which the woman promptly replies, "I'm Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?"

"Hum," I said. "You don't sound at all like a historical person." And after trying to beat her into shape for a few pages, I said, "Well, heck, I'm not going to fight with you all the way through this book. Nobody's ever going to see it, so 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 her fault.


Q. Why historical fiction? Does the historical setting offer possibilities that you don't find in modern times?

A. That could be a wonderfully complex question, with answers dealing with the simple fascination of strange times and places, the incomparable opportunity for cultural contrast, social context and commentary, to deeper questions of the universality of the human condition, and how much or how little human nature is affected by the times.

As it is, though, I picked historical fiction because it seemed far and away the easiest thing for me to use for a practice novel. I.e., historical fiction has no real genre constraints, and...I was a research professor. In the sciences, but still -- I knew what to do with a library. It seemed easier to look things up than to make them up, and as I told my husband at the time, "If I turn out to have no imagination, I can steal things from the historical record."


Q. You write long, complex novels filled with characters and details of life in other eras. Do you have a system for keeping track of it all?

A. Depends what you mean by "keeping track." I don't keep notes, do outlines, make wall charts or have boxes full of index cards. I don't outline, nor do I write in a straight line. I write where I can see things happening, and consequently, have zillions of small, disconnected bits, which gradually coalesce into large chunks, and in the fullness of time, these kind of assort themselves into a rough chronological order, and if we're all lucky, at that point, I'll begin to perceive the "shape" of the book, after which the writing gets much faster, because I know where things go.

The only thing I do of an organizational nature is by way of finding a specific bit when I want it. This is really crude, but it works. All my files are named in a format that tells me which book (novella, story, etc.) the scene belongs to, and the year and date on which I began writing that particular scene. All the main Outlander books have a filename that begins "JAMIE," for instance, while the Lord John Grey books and novellas have the main word or an abbreviation thereof from the title: SOLDIER (for "The Haunted Soldier"), SUCC (for "Lord John and the Succubus"), BROTHER (for Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade), etc.

I use a symbol from the top row of the keyboard to indicate year -- this year's symbol is the octoplex (#) -- then there's a dot (I'm a DOS-head who still uses Word Perfect 5.1, what can I tell you) and a two or three-digit extension that signifies the date. If I were to begin a scene today (and I will), the filename would be SOLDIER#.12, because I'm working on a novella titled "Lord John and the Haunted Soldier," this is 2006, and today is January 2nd.

I keep a Master File for each book or novella. This is a listing of all the files so far written, with the filename, followed by a few keywords. When the pieces start to stick together, and I want -- for example -- the scene in which Lord John meets a ghost (or is he?) at the Sundial Arch of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich -- I'd pull up the Master File and type "Sundial" or "ghost" into the search function, and it would obligingly tell me that that scene is filename SOLDIER@.d23, whereupon I could pull that scene in and join it to whatever it goes with.

I was going to say that's as far as I go in terms of being organized, but it really isn't. I go so far as to collect the reference books that are specific to a given project into one shelf or bookcase, so I can find them when I need them. And I have three of those soft-sided, zippered quasi-briefcases from Levenger's, in different colors -- I shove miscellaneous loose bits of reference material (maps, pamphlets, hand-written family trees and newspaper clippings that people send me) into these. Blue for the main Outlander novel of the moment, Red for the contemporary mystery I'm working on (titled Red Ant's Head -- I'm rather simple-minded when it comes to organization), and Black for Lord John's stuff.

That's about it, though.


Q. Do you research before you begin writing, while you're writing, or after you've completed a draft?

A. While. I know way too many people who set out years ago to write a historical novel, started researching, and never put down Word One on paper. When I began writing OUTLANDER for practice, I reasoned thusly: "The point here is to learn to write a novel, not to learn everything there is to know about Scotland in the eighteenth century. If I write something and it turns out later to be wrong, I can change it. If I never write anything, being right won't help."

So I write and research concurrently, and it works out very well; given my piecemeal methods of composition, I find that the research and the writing kind of feed off each other. An interesting factoid or historical insight can trigger a scene -- the need to know something specific for a scene will lead me to some resource which in turn reveals something I'd never have thought of looking for, but which is nonetheless important.


Q. Do you have a firm concept of the story before you start writing, or do you let it grow organically?

A. It's sort of like mushrooms sprouting in compost, so I imagine "organic" is a very good term for it. This is not to indicate that there is no structure to it -- there is -- but it may not be apparent either to the casual observer or to me, at least not at first.


Q. Would you describe your writing routine?

A. It depends a bit on where I am in the book (it normally takes me two to three years to write one of the enormous historical novels). In the beginning, I don't know much about the story, nor the specific background, so am doing a lot of research and thinking, writing relatively little -- but writing every day; if you stop, the inertia builds up and it's hard to get going again.

As I move further into the story and begin to know more, I write more. "Walking pace" through the main part of a novel is roughly two single-spaced pages (about a thousand words) a day; some days I make more, but if I get that much, I'm satisfied.

And then, as I get near the end, and know almost everything, I'm not having to do much research, but am writing madly; the story develops "critical mass," sucks me in (and people are calling up from New York, yelling about where is this story), and we enter what I call Final Frenzy. In this stage, I'm writing for as long as I can sit at the computer, maybe twelve to fifteen hours a day, and barely eating or sleeping. Luckily, this stage never lasts more than two or three months, or I'd die.

During the long middle portion of a book, though, my daily routine is more or less this: Get up around 9 AM, stagger upstairs with a Diet Coke, answer email and write Forum messages (the Compuserve Books and Writers community, where I've been hanging around for the last twenty years or so), and then work for an hour or so before lunch, to get a foothold on the day. Lunch with my husband, then another hour or so of work after lunch, followed by whatever business or errands need to be done, then exercise, gardening, dinner-shopping, dinner-making, dinner-eating...then a spell of family time; watching Perry Mason reruns, doing crossword puzzles, going for ice-cream, whatever. My husband likes to go to bed early, so I tuck him in around 10 PM, and go lie down on the couch with a book -- either research or recreation. If no one needs me (and now that the kids are all in college, the chances that someone will are substantially decreased, but it still happens now and then), I'll fall asleep after a bit, and nap until about midnight. Then I wake up, stagger back upstairs with a Diet Coke and work until around 3 AM -- that's my prime writing time.


Q. How has your writing changed since your first novel?

A. Well, I'd like to hope it's gotten better. Not, I hasten to add, that I thought my first book was bad; just that I think if you keep working and pay attention to what you're doing, you do naturally improve. The writing becomes deeper, richer, and more thematically complex.


Q. You seem to be a born teacher -- writers who attend your workshops rave about how much you've taught them. Which writers have you learned from, and what have you learned?

A. I learn from every book I read -- the bad ones as well as the good. A Breath of Snow and Ashes is dedicated to my five literary role models -- the writers from whom I took specific lessons while writing my first book. Charles Dickens -- from him, I learned the art and importance of character and situation Robert Louis Stevenson -- basic storytelling and the feel of adventure Dorothy Leigh Sayers -- dialogue, elegance of language, and the importance of social nuance John D. MacDonald -- narrative drive, and the art of the sudden, offbeat detail in fixing a character or scene vividly in the reader's eye P.G. Wodehouse -- humor, and the art of using language for fun.


Q. What will we see from you next -- another mystery or another Outlander book?

A. I'm working on three (or four) projects simultaneously -- that prevents writer's block and increases productivity -- including the next Outlander novel -- but the next book to be finished will be a collection of short fiction starring Lord John Grey, if only because that book requires only one additional novella ("Lord John and the Haunted Soldier") to be done, and the German publisher asked if I might be able to finish that by the end of February, so they could publish the book. Title of the book itself is Lord John and the Hand of Devils. It includes "Lord John and the Hellfire Club," and "Lord John and the Succubus," which were previously published in, respectively, a mystery anthology and a fantasy anthology (one of the side-effects of writing unclassifiable fiction is that you get invited to participate in everything), in addition to "Haunted Soldier."

I expect also to finish Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade, which is a novel, in 2006. And I am working on Red Ant's Head, a contemporary mystery set in the American Southwest. Couldn't tell you when that one, or Book Seven of the Outlander series will be done, though -- time will tell!


Visit the author's web site at www.dianagabaldon.com.