Words matter. These are the best Diana Gabaldon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Now I’ve got a fairly good grasp of the 18th century on what was common and what people thought. But I don’t write in order. I write bits and pieces and sort of glue them.
A romance is a courtship story. In the 19th century, the definition of the romance genre was an escape from daily life that included adventure and love and battle. But in the 20th century, that term changed, and now it’s deemed only a love story, specifically a courtship story.
The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn’t want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There’s just something hard to beat about a book.
Oh, ‘Pandaemonium’, by Chris Brookmyre! Just fabulous – such a layered, beautifully structured, engaging, intelligent book. I love all Chris’s stuff, but this was remarkable.
If you call it a romance, it will never be reviewed by the ‘New York Times’ or any other respectable literary venue. And that’s okay. I can live with that.
Well, I can’t remember not being able to read. I was told I could read by myself very well at the age of three.
If nobody needs me – and usually, these days, they don’t – I’ll fall asleep until around midnight. Then I go upstairs and work until 4 A.M., and that’s when I go back to bed for good. It suits me.
All I had when I began writing the first book was rather vague images conjured up by the notion of a man in a kilt, so essentially I began with Jamie, although I had no idea what his name was at the time.
I will literally read anything, regardless of genre, fiction or non-fiction, as long as it’s well written.
I happened to see a really old ‘Doctor Who’, the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, and he’d picked up a Scotsman from 1745. It was an 18 or 19-year-old man who appeared in a kilt, and I thought, ‘That’s rather fetching.’
I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read ‘The Hobbit’ and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.
Part of my purpose in my books has been to tell the complete story of a relationship and a marriage, not just to end with ‘happily ever after,’ leaving the protagonists at the altar or in bed… I wanted to show some of the complicated business of actually living a successful marriage.
Cultural concepts are one of the most fascinating things about historical fiction.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I’ve written a graphic novel.
Mid-afternoon, I’ll go out and do the household errands, come home, do my gardening, go for an evening walk.
I was writing ‘Outlander’ for practise and didn’t want anyone to know I was doing it. So I couldn’t very well announce to my husband that I was quitting my job and abandoning him with three small children to visit Scotland to do research for a novel that I hadn’t told him I was writing.
If you’re writing something that’s clearly labelled as an alternative history, of course it’s perfectly legitimate to play with known historical characters and events, but less so when you’re writing an essentially straight historical fiction.
My sixth book, ‘A Breath of Snow and Ashes,’ was nominated for a number of book awards, one of which was The Quill Award, and they had it in New York at the Natural History Museum.
You see one scene shot 25 times in one day, which is totally fascinating, but while you’re watching it, you’re remembering, ‘This is what I was thinking when I was writing that part of the book,’ and so it brings it all back very gradually as you’re working.
At one point, some years ago, a nice gentleman had it in mind to do ‘Outlander The Musical.’
It’s worth noting that at the time of the American Revolution, no sane person would have given two cents for its success.
Eight was about the age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn’t just spring out of the library shelves.
I’ve had no fewer than three young women on separate occasions come up to me at book signings and unzip their pants, turn around, and drop them to show me that they had ‘Bonnie lassie’ tattooed across their rumpuses!
I read all the time. People ask, ‘Do you read while you work?’ And I say, ‘I better.’ I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can’t go that long without reading.
My mother taught me to read in part by reading me Walt Disney comics, and I never stopped.
We started watching ‘Doctor Who’ as a family because our first daughter was a cranky baby, and she would get up during the night – and it was her dad’s job to stay up because I worked at night.
There’s always a temptation, I think, among some historical writers to shade things toward the modern point of view. You know, they won’t show someone doing something that would have been perfectly normal for the time but that is considered reprehensible today.
I’ve never seen anyone deal in a literary way with what it takes to stay married for more than 50 years, and that seemed like a worthy goal.
Some time later, long after ‘Voyager’ was published, I came across the Dunbonnet in another reference, and it gave an expanded version, and it told me the Dunbonnet’s name – which was James Fraser.
If you’re going to have more than one person read your book, they’re going to have totally different opinions and responses. No person – no two people – read the same book.
If you want to know anything about me, read my books – it’s all there.
Back in the day, years ago, in 1988, the only TV I watched was ‘Doctor Who’ because I had children and two full-time jobs, and ‘Doctor Who’ was the exact length of time it took to do my nails, so I would watch ‘Doctor Who’ once a week!
I don’t plot the books out ahead of time, I don’t plan them. I don’t begin at the beginning and end at the end. I don’t work with an outline and I don’t work in a straight line.
I took to saying, ‘Look, tell you what: Pick it up; open it anywhere. Read three pages. If you can put it down again, I’ll pay you a dollar. So I never lost any money on that bet, but I sold a lot of books.
I began writing ‘Outlander’ in 1988, so the Internet as we now know it didn’t exist.
From the late ’70s to the early ’90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow’s skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II… to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.
I grew up in Flagstaff, and I still own my old family house up there, so I go up there a couple of times a month just to sit for a day or two and work without any kind of interruption, and I usually take a dinner break, and I’ll watch two hours of DVD.
There are always people screeching and upset that I did this or didn’t do that. Basically, they’re upset that I didn’t rewrite an earlier book they particularly liked.
I was 35, had always wanted to write novels, and thought that I had better do it while I was young enough.
In 18th-century Scotland, the main event was the Jacobite rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie, so that seems like a nice dramatic backdrop.
People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.
I read some books, and I thought, ‘This is better than sliced bread!’ and a month later, I couldn’t remember thinking about it. And I’ve read others that were kind of a slog, and I’ve put them down and come back six months later thinking, ‘Wow, this is great.’ So, you know, things change all the time.
I don’t think I ever consciously separated ‘school’ books from any others; I just read anything that came across my path.
I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It’s not part of the plot.
I don’t plan the books ahead of time. It’s not like Harry Potter. I don’t work in a straight line. I don’t write with an outline.
I’m not a team player. I’m used to having total control over everything I do.
I thought at first that I might write mysteries, but then I said, ‘Mysteries have plots, and I’m not sure I can do that yet.’
I cannot remember not being able to read.
I think characters are going to be, if not a reflection of the author, at least some refraction of some part of their personality.
It takes me about three years to write a book. They’re very complex, and they take a lot of research, but also because the more popular your books get, the more popular you get, and people want to haul you off and look at you.
I have friends who are writers who have had movies made of their books, and they are almost uniformly horrified about what’s been done – or, at least, dissatisfied.
One of the great perks of being a writer is that you can work when you’re mentally capable of it, not when someone else thinks you should.
People ask me why I write strong women, and I say, ‘Well, I don’t like stupid ones.’ Who would want to read about weak and whiny women? Are they people who assume women are weak and whiny? If so, why do they think that?
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