'Outlander' author Diana Gabaldon makes light of her growing success

25 April 2017 - 02:00 By Rosa Lyster
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Bestselling writer Diana Gabaldon always knew she was meant to be a writer.
Bestselling writer Diana Gabaldon always knew she was meant to be a writer.
Image: Colin McPherson/Corbis via Getty Images

There's hard work and then there's raw talent. With 25 millions copies of sold books under her belt, author Diana Gabaldon obviously has both, writes Rosa Lyster

On my way to interview Diana Gabaldon, the writer of the genre-bending Outlander series, I phoned a friend. I knew this particular friend to be a huge fan of Gabaldon's work and I wanted to know if there were any questions she wanted me to ask. She only had one. "Ask her what it feels like to be a bestselling novelist."

I didn't get around to asking it in the end, because I didn't need to. It was clear within minutes of meeting Gabaldon that it feels great, and she's having the time of her life.

Novelists are meant to be tortured souls - they're meant to be typing through their tears while wearing some old pyjamas, cursing the fact of their nature. Writing isn't supposed to be fun.

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But Gabaldon makes the whole thing seem like an absolute riot. As she should. The Outlander series, which centres on the adventures of a time-travelling World War2 nurse and an 18th-century Scottish warrior, have sold 25million copies.

The ninth book in the series is forthcoming. She has a hardcore army of fans. The TV series based on her books, now filming its third season, has been rapturously received, with ratings getting higher all the time. If there is a formula to this kind of wild success, then Gabaldon has cracked it.

Not to rub it in further, but she wrote the first book in the series (published in 1991) for practice. Just to see if she could. While working full time as a professor of science at the University of Arizona. And parenting three small children. The woman does not mess around.

Gabaldon is in Cape Town because the third season of the show is being filmed there and she is visiting the set.

Over the course of our interview she tells me that she knew from a very early age that she was meant to be a writer. Her background in science seems at first to contradict this, but for Gabaldon there is no sharp distinction to be drawn between science and art. Both of them, she says, rest on pattern, and she is a person who is good at identifying and making patterns.

Besides, writing historical novels requires detailed research, and there's no one more qualified for that than an academic.

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Gabaldon draws inspiration from many sources. She tells me that her influences range from Stevenson to Dickens to Sayers to Wodehouse to John D McDonald, a writer of detective thrillers set in Florida.

She set her books in the Highlands, she says, because she saw an old episode of Dr Who set there, and couldn't get the image of a man wearing a kilt out of her head.

She shows me how a photograph of Scottish crystal glassware on the cover of a Sotheby's catalogue, for instance, can prompt the writing of a scene, and how she builds a story from a kernel.

First the glass, then the light bending through the glass and falling in a pool of amber light, which means there's whisky in the glass, and it's sitting on a polished table top, and there's a fire, and candlelight, which means it's getting late, and suddenly she has a scene. She makes it sound so easy.

Of course, it isn't. A person doesn't sell 25million copies of their books without working incredibly hard, and making very good decisions. Gabaldon has clearly done these things, and clearly possesses the rare quality of persistence.

She makes it sound easy because she loves what she does, and that's even rarer.

Follow the author of this article, Rosa Lyster, on Twitter: @rosalyster.

This article was originally published in The Times.

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