Outlander author Diana Gabaldon knows how series will end, shares her favorite characters and more

For international best-selling author Diana Gabaldon seeing the characters of her beloved Outlander novels come to life on screen has been a thrilling experience. Gabaldon has immersed herself in the worlds of former World War II combat nurse Claire Randall and rugged Scottish warrior Jamie Fraser for almost 25 years, telling their complex love story over numerous novels. Her books have amassed an incredible fan base and are published in 26 countries and in 23 languages. Her first book — Outlander — is being played out in Season 1 of Starz’s cable series, which returns for eight new episodes beginning Saturday, April 4, 2015 (the first eight episodes debuted in August 2014). The TV series is executive produced by Ronald D. Moore, with Gabaldon serving as an adviser. We sat down with Gabaldon earlier this year to discuss her book’s transition to screen, her fan base, her writing process and more. Here’s what we learned …

The majority of the TV series is taken directly from her novel but deconstruction is necessary and things won’t happen in exact sequences and/or may be different…
Diana Gabaldon: I’d say maybe 85 percent is taken from the books — straight lines and everything, but it has to be slightly tweaked in order to achieve that dramatic structure. They will deconstruct the book into all of its separate scenes and all of its separate lines of dialog, and then they move things around. They say, “Well we think we could do this, and in that we can take that piece from over here, but then we need to get back to the main plot line, so we’ll have to write a little piece here that will make that turn back into this.” The overall effect is a realization of Outlander. Anyone who is a fan of the books would recognize it instantly from the show, and love it.
But at the same time, there’s this wonderful feeling of novelty and discovery because things are not going to happen in the exact sequence that you expect them, and they may not happen in the exact way that you expect them. Sometimes a scene will have been deconstructed into two or three separate parts which occur in other places, so you’ll be saying, “Well I missed my favorite line,” but it’s coming, it’s just somewhere else.

The TV series will enrich your experience of the book …
There are so many tweaks and adaptations by necessity that people will say, “Oh, it wasn’t like this in the book,” and I said, “Look, if you’re going to watch the show with the book in one hand, you’re not going to enjoy either one.” I said, “It does change, and this is why,” and I explained the adaptation process to them and why it has to change like that. I said, “So, just relax, enjoy the show. It’s not going to take away anything from the book; it will probably enrich your experience of the book, and vice versa. If you’ve been watching the show, the book will give you a much fuller explanation on everything that’s going on.”

Television doesn’t have the same freedoms that Gabaldon enjoys — like infinite room to tell the story…
When I’m writing a book I’m God, essentially. The climaxes can be where I want; the other pacing is just what I like, because I have infinite room, essentially. They don’t have that for a TV show, they have 55 minutes, then good luck. Sixteen of them, which is unheard-of generosity for a TV series, but still, it is limited room. There’s only so much you can do, and also, an episode has to have its own little dramatic arc, it has to be watchable on its own and separate from all the others. You can’t just have one that’s all explication because you’re going to do the climax in the next one. You can’t expect people to tune in next week if you haven’t given them something to enjoy here.

Gabaldon appreciates her passionate fan base and celebrates them by sharing fan mail, photos and posts from them on her website. She isn’t, however, going to be influenced by opinions on storylines for the future direction of the series …
I wrote Outlander for practice and I did not tell anyone what I was doing partly because I didn’t want people saying, “Why aren’t you finished yet?” Or making absurd assumptions about, “Oh well you’ll finish the book and get a million dollars for it,” because I knew this wouldn’t happen. Most of all, I didn’t want anyone telling what I was doing wrong until I had figured it out for myself. I said, “I’m just going to write by myself.”
That’s a very freeing experience when you have the liberty to try things. Maybe you make mistakes, maybe you change your mind, but you have total liberty. You’re not giving somebody a chapter and they’re saying, “Oh, I love this,” and then the next week you have rewritten it as something else and they’re saying, “Well I don’t like this,” and you’re saying, “Well I like that.” I mean I don’t want arguments. Having written with that mindset, I intend to just continue doing that, and I have because if you have more than one reader, you’re never going to please them all, so why even think about it? I never have.

Now penning the ninth book in the series, Gabaldon says she has thought of how it will all end …
Well, I mean, I know what the last scene is, but that doesn’t mean I have any idea how we get there! … I know what the last scene is, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the plot. It’s sort of like the prologues of the book; so I know what happens there, but that doesn’t have anything to do with how we will get there.

Gabaldon doesn’t use an outline when writing her books, she lets each of the novels take their own shape developing it in bits and pieces and a lot of fiddling…
Each book determines its own shape, and the series has a much bigger shape of itself. As I get more and more pieces of a book, then I can see the ultimate shape. I’m getting to the point where I can see the ultimate shape of the series. I still don’t have any idea what’s in the book I’m writing specifically, but I can sort of see the shape of it. What it has to achieve in an emotional, as well as a historical and plot-wise kind of way.
That’s kind of underlying whatever I’m doing. I don’t outline books. I don’t plan them out ahead of time, because this would not be fun. I don’t write in a straight line. I write in little bits and pieces where I can see things happening. Sometimes those things are stimulated by the research or by something I’ve overheard or some bit of interesting trivia that someone’s sent me. Things like that, and so just little by little.
I can’t predict any of that, but what I can do is take it and execute a scene. The scene itself talks to me while I’m working, so I work very slowly, back and forth, and back and forth. I don’t write rough drafts, I just fiddle a lot until it’s as good as I can make it. Then if I know what happens next, I’ll write that, if I don’t I’ll go write something else.

Each book takes years to write and each book is carefully managed to avoid too much backstory.
It takes about three years to write one of the big main books … with all of the research and the construction work because the books have to be engineered so that a person who is picking up this book, say in an airport bookshop, and does not know that there are seven enormous books preceding it, will still be able to enjoy this book on its own terms.
At the same time, it can’t have so much backstory that it bores people who have read the preceding seven books. That’s a very delicate feat of engineering, which actually takes quite a lot of time to work out.
The baseline rule of dealing with backstory is don’t ever tell the readers anything until they have to know it.

StarzOutside of Claire and Jamie, naming her top 5 other characters she’s added along the way proved challenging …

Oh, I’m extremely fond of all of them, but I guess my favorites would be Murtagh  (Jamie’s godfather), I’m very fond of. Let’s see … Roger MacKenzie. John Grey who also will be introduced in Season 2, or book two; though he doesn’t really come into his own until the third season, and so forth. That’s three of them. Let’s see. Just amongst my favorites that are pleasure to write with, yeah, Colum and Dougal I love them dearly, but they’re much more difficult to write.

Setting the book in Scotland and the TV series filming in Scotland has resulted in a boost in the economy. Gabaldon is even credited for saving a local weaving mill thanks to the costuming needed  …
My husband joked saying: “So, you’ve boosted the Scottish economy. You’ve saved the local weaving industry, and you’ve preserved the Gaelic language. What are you going to do for an encore? Oh, that’s right. You’re going to act.”

Gabaldon is overly modest when it comes to intervening in the production and filming of the TV series, so much so that when it came to a historical inaccuracy it was actually her husband who interjected on set …
There was actually only one very minor thing. I was at one point outside the set talking to my husband who had made friends with all the technicians, learning how all the equipment works, so he was having a ball. We were watching one of the scenes that were being shot and it was of the oath taking when Dougal is giving Colum his oath and so forth. He put his hands in Colum’s, and Colum raised them and kissed his hands. I said, “That’s not right, it’s the other way around,” and Doug said, “Well shouldn’t you tell them?” I said, “Well I’m kind of embarrassed to.” He said, “I’ll tell them,” so he tapped the nearest technician and he said, “She says ….” and so they stopped everything and hauled out the director, or the director of photography and the writer. I was going, “Dear God, I don’t mean to be so particular, but just so you know …”
Anyway, they re-shot it, which was very nice of them.