Diana Gabaldon is the internationally bestselling author of many historical novels. She lives with her family in Scottsdale, Arizona. Her novels in the ‘Outlander’ series include: A Breath of Snow and Ashes; The Fiery Cross; Drums of Autumn; Voyager; Dragon Fly in Amber and Cross Stitch. Books in the ‘Lord John’ series include: Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade; Lord John and the Hand of Devils; Lord John and the Private Matter. Her most recent novel, An Echo in the Bone, is published by Hachette this October.

An Echo in the Bone is the latest ‘Outlander’ novel, set in the wake of a devastating fire in the mountains of North Carolina. Highlander Jamie Fraser and his English wife, Claire, find themselves homeless and without family, in the midst of the gathering storm of revolution. And thanks to his time-travelling wife's information, he knows what the coming spring of 1778 will bring. But then Jamie's illegitimate son, William, arrives in North Carolina, a young officer in King George's army. Jamie has sworn two things to himself: his son will never know his true paternity – and he himself will never face his son across the barrel of a gun. The Frasers' daughter and her family have returned safely through the standing stones that guard the passage through time and to Scotland. But something mysterious looms over their new home. Something whose secret may draw them back to what they fled from…

gr recently caught up with Diana to chat about An Echo in the Bone and her writing career.

GR: How has a background in science helped you in your writing career?
DG: Well, as a result of all the writing one does in the course of a scientific career, I did know one end of a sentence from the other, and could write with a minimum of clarity.  That always helps.

GR: Which other authors inspired you to start writing your first novel?
DG: None of them. I just knew (from quite an early age) that I was meant to write novels; I just didn't know how. [It’s not] something they cover in school Career-Day presentations – there is no ‘career path’ for being a novelist. If you want to be a CPA, a lawyer, a doctor, etc., it's all laid out for you: attend these classes, take these exams, do this internship/residency, apply for a license or certificate, and Bob's your uncle. Fortunately, they don't make you get a license to write a novel.

GR: You were born in the United States, yet your ‘Outlander’ series follows characters through Scotland and France. What attracted you to a European setting rather than a more familiar American one?
DG: If you're a halfway decent novelist, you can be anybody. Anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances at all.
I decided to write a historical novel (for practice; I didn't mean to show it to anyone; I just wanted to learn how to write a novel) in part because I was a research professor (I happen to have three degrees in science, including a PhD in Quantitative Behavioural Ecology. My doctoral dissertation was a 400-page opus entitled ‘Nest Site Selection in the Pinyon Jay, Gymnorhynus cyanocephalus’ – or, as my husband says, ‘Why birds build nests where they do, and who cares anyway?’). I knew what to do with a library. It seemed (slightly) easier to look things up than to make them up, and – I thought – if I turned out to have no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record. (This works very well, as a matter of fact.)
Having decided that, I began casting round for an interesting time and place in which to set this putative book – and in this malleable frame of mind, happened to see a Really Old episode of Dr Who, in which the Doctor's companion was a young Scotsman from 1745, who appeared in his kilt. I found myself still thinking about this the next day – in church <cough> – and said, ‘Okay. You want to write a novel; doesn't really matter where you set it, as you'll need to look up everything anyway. The important thing is to pick a point and get started. Fine, then – Scotland, eighteenth century.’ And that’s all there was to it.

GR: You use traditional Celtic language frequently throughout your books. Where did you become familiar with words that have fallen out of common usage?
DG: I'm not sure whether you mean Scots or Gaelic. In either case, the answer's the same; I began with dictionaries, and went on to research with native speakers – musical groups, Scottish novelists, BBC programs – and anywhere else curiosity and a scholar's nose might lead.

GR: There are lots of different elements contained within the 'Outlander' series making it difficult to pinpoint a particular genre as it stretches from romance to sci-fi and to historical fiction. How would you describe your novels?
DG: ‘Fiction’ will do nicely, thank you. So far, I've seen my books sold (with evident success) as Fiction, Literature, Historical Fiction, Historical NON-fiction (really), Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery, Romance, Military History, Gay and Lesbian Fiction (really <grins>), and Horror (no, really; my last 'Outlander' novel – A Breath of Snow and Ashes – won a Quill award in the ‘science-fiction/fantasy/horror’ category –incidentally beating out both George RR Martin and Stephen King in the process, which I thought was pretty cool).
The thing is, if you try to describe the books in terms of genre, you'll automatically exclude or turn off people who don't like that genre – whereas they very likely would enjoy my books. Each of my novels includes a murder mystery, for instance – but they certainly aren't mystery novels. Likewise, there are romantic elements – but they surely aren't romance novels. They are both science-fiction and fantasy (those being separate concepts), but they definitely aren't what people think of when they hear either of those terms. They certainly are historical fiction – and quite accurate historical fiction, at that – but people aren't accustomed to having time-travel mixed with their history. So ‘fiction’ seems the label least likely to cause people to recoil, saying, ‘Oh, I don't read that kind of book!’

GR: With your books partly set in 18th-century Scotland, it’s great to have a modern voice for readers in the form of time-travelling Claire. However, as a nurse from World War II, Claire isn’t exactly a contemporary of your readers. Why did you choose this 20th Century setting?
DG: Naturally the character(s) in historical fiction aren't contemporaries of the readers—that's sort of the point, isn't it?
Claire's being a time-traveller was an accident – like most of the events of my literary career. Having realised that, though, my job was to figure out exactly when she came from. Her voice was distinctly modern in tone – clearly she was from somewhere in the 20th century – and distinctly English, in terms both of tone and idiom.
When I began thinking about her, I considered what skills I might like to have, were I an inadvertent time-traveller, and came to the conclusion that – ancient medicine being what it was – it might be good to be something in the medical line, if only to improve one's odds of survival.
Still, I couldn't see her being a 1990s-era doctor. Medicine in the 1980s and 90s became terribly technology-oriented, and the notion of this woman coming across a battlefield casualty and wringing her hands over the lack of an MRI machine … cognitive dissonance, you know?
Ergo, she needed to come from sometime a trifle earlier – when hands-on medicine was more the norm. At the same time, I wanted her to come from a time when the three great advances of modern medicine had been made: antisepsis, antibiotics, and anaesthesia. (She didn't need to be a contemporary of the reader, but I thought it would be good if she shared some common assumptions and attitudes. Empathy between a character and the reader is a Good Thing (noting that empathy is not identity).)
Well, anaesthesia and germ theory were both in existence in the latter part of the 19th century, but antibiotics (penicillin), while discovered (briefly) in 1896, and more durably in 1927, only came into widespread use on the battlefields of World War II. That suited me, since I could tell that this person was not a hysterical wimp; she was plainly someone with a good deal of grit, who'd been through the sort of experience that would allow her to deal with the exigencies of eighteenth-century Scotland. And while there were female doctors in the mid-20th century, they were by no means common.
'Ah,’ I said [to myself]. ‘She was a WWII English combat nurse.’ And so she was.

GR: You’ve been writing about Claire and Jamie for almost two decades. How are you keeping their stories fresh? Do you have to deal with different issues as they age?
DG: Well, they're real people; naturally they have different issues as they age. As to keeping fresh – interesting people remain interesting. I just pay attention to them.

GR: In 1999, you wrote The Outlandish Companion to help readers develop a clearer picture of the ‘Outlander’ series. With three new additions published since then, are you planning to update this encyclopaedia?
DG: I wrote it in an effort to answer all the questions people had been asking me over the years, but people luckily seem to like and enjoy it. (My husband says it's a great bathroom book, since you can open it anywhere and read a bit.) I'm thinking that I'll probably publish a second volume, covering the rest of the series and answering more questions <grins>, rather than update the first, though.

GR: The 'Lord John' series complements the 'Outlander'. Why did you feel that it was important to follow Lord John Grey instead of developing an entirely new character?
DG: Well, I didn't intend to write a new series to start with. I was asked – some twelve or thirteen years ago – to write a short story for a British anthology of ‘historical crime.’ ‘Hum,’ I said. ‘It would be an interesting technical challenge, to see if I can write something shorter than 300,000 words. Sure, why not?’
So, the next problem was, what – or rather, who – to write about? I didn't want to use the major characters from my novels, because of the way I write. That is, I don't write with an outline, and I don't write in a straight line. Ergo, if I did something in a short story that had sufficient significance and moral weight to make a decent story, that would leave me with a rock that I'd need to steer around in the next book I wrote. No point in complicating things, so I began looking about for someone else – and there was Lord John.
Lord John is a mushroom, as I call them – a character who just pops up out of nowhere, fully-formed. He talks to me easily, he has built-in conflicts, because of who and what he is – and he appears only sporadically in the context of the main novels. Obviously, he's off having interesting adventures in the lacunae when he's not onstage – so why not write about one of those?
So I did, and everyone liked the story, and all was beer and skittles … but then the anthology went out of print, as British anthologies tend to do. And people who'd heard about the story kept asking me about it, saying that Lord John was their favourite character, and where could they find this?
Well, without going into a lot of tedious detail, I decided to write two or three more Lord John short stories/novellas, just as time and inspiration allowed; whenever I'd collected enough, we could have a slim volume of them, and Lord John's fans could have that original story, plus more. So I began writing the second Lord John short story, along with the novel I was working on (I normally work on more than one project at a time, save in the very final stages of a novel's completion). I finished it about six months later, and mentioned it to my two literary agents, with whom I was having lunch.
‘Oh? How long's this one?’ they asked. To which I replied, ‘Oh, maybe 85,000 words; I need another five thousand or so to finish it.’
They looked at each, then at me, and with one voice said, ‘That's the size normal books are!’ ‘I thought it was a short story,’ I said, to which they replied (again in unison), ‘Well, it's NOT.’ They then took it off and sold it all over the place, and all the publishers said, ‘Oh! A Gabaldon story we weren't expecting – and it's SHORT!!’ (They were delirious.) ‘Can she do that again?’ they all asked. To which my agents – being excellent agents –replied, ‘Oh, I'm sure she could!’ So all these publishers gave me a three-book contract to write more Lord John books, and there we are. To date, there are three Lord John books in print: Lord John and the Private Matter (aka my second short story), Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade (which actually is a novel), and Lord John and the Hand of Devils. That last one isn't the third book of my contract, though; it's a collection of three novellas, including the original short story that started the whole thing, ‘Lord John and the Hellfire Club.’ The third Lord John novel, Lord John and the Scottish Prisoner, will be along in due course, though.

GR: If the ‘Outlander’ series was made into a film, who would you want to see portraying the main characters?
DG: I've never seen anyone who looks like them. And beyond the issue of crude physical resemblance … look, actors act, just as novelists write. You can't tell by looking whether a given actor could or could not perform the particular magic that would let them embody Claire, Jamie, or Murtagh.

GR: Is An Echo in the Bone the final novel in the ‘Outlander’ series? If not, where do you see it ending?
DG: No. There's certainly at least one more book to follow Echo. I know there is an ending – because I've written it – but I have no idea where (or when) that actually is.

An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon will be published by Orion in October, rrp $35.00.

I love how Diana writes both in her novels and in her author voice Part of why I liked cross stitch though was because the girl on the cover looked like me - yes I know that is a bone of contingency in Ms Gabaldon's side but here in Aus that's how we received her first Outlander book - of course I was hooked after the first paragraph & it mattered not what the cover looked like after that!

I also write and my first book is 335,000 plus and no not just because my fave novelist writes that large but because the story took over and wrote itself! I ended up with a second prequel mystery I never knew had been there! In one of Ms Gabaldon's notes she mentions spending nights on the floor of her study and I relate to that! This second mystery wrote itself in 3 weeks straight me typing non stop just as eager to turn the page and find out what happens next as if I was reading a Gabaldon novel!

Thank you GR for this fabulous interview! Her style and her fresh easy love of words is gloriously inspirational to say the least!
Chookas! e

After investing two days reading an Echo In the Bone I can only say WHAT? I thought a book needs a beginning a middle and an end. What happened to the ending? Nothing was finalized. I feel cheated. I don't not want to wait another three years to find out what really happened. I loved her other books - they stood on their own, but this was obviously done for commercial purposes. Well I won't be buying another book and I'm angry I wasted my time!