The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [207]
I have about two hundred books that belong to the university library (every so often they want one back, which is a traumatic experience), and I also buy books like salted peanuts. I carry a research book around in the car, to read at stoplights or at kids’ flute lessons, and I read research material while I work out on an exercise bike or treadmill. Sometimes I do have something specific to look up—like how to extract a tooth, or how many slaves were on the average sugar plantation in North
Carolina in 1767, or how much a black bear weighs, but it really doesn’t take time to discover a discrete fact—it’s the browsing and finding fascinating items like hanged-men’s grease (that’s historically true, by the way—it was one of the perks of an eighteenth century hangman) that take time. Fortunately, it’s also fun.
At one point, I recall coming across a mention of a specific book that seemed, from its title, likely to be important in terms of the research for Voyager. The university library didn’t have it, and I didn’t have time to wait for them to obtain it through interlibrary loan. I called around, and finally located two copies of the book, in a bookstore in New York City. By coincidence, the bookstore was located on the first floor of the building in which my publisher’s offices were located. Which is how it happened that my (extremely obliging and forbearant) editor found herself attempting to keep a straight face while asking the bookstore clerk for two copies of Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition.26
Q: How did you get the Scottish accent right? I am a Scot with a passion for Scottish history, and having heard that you are not Scottish, was frankly expecting the worst. I was pleasantly surprised!
A: Thank you—I’m pleased to hear it! I “got” the Scottish accents from quite a few sources, but the main bases were Scottish novels (written by Scots, I mean) and Scottish folk song recordings. Especially in live recordings, groups (like the Corries, for example) will banter with the audience, and you can hear them talk, as well as pick up idiom and vocabulary from the songs themselves.
The “accent” isn’t purely an accent, of course—it’s my approximation of Scots, which is a real dialect of English. It’s not the same thing as Gaelic, which is a completely separate language. Scots is English, but has quite a number of specific words and idioms not found in standard English, and also has its own peculiarly idiosyncratic sentence structures.
Q: Your books are so complex! Do you use an outline?
A: No, I don’t use an outline. Of course, I also don’t write in a straight line; I write in lots of little pieces and then glue them together like a jigsaw puzzle. I’ll work forward and back, backward and forward, until a scene is finished—then hop somewhere else and write something different. I don’t even have chapters, until just before I print the completed manuscript to send to my editor; breaking the text into chapters and titling them is just about the last thing I do to a book.27
And yes, now and then I’ll have scenes or fragments that either don’t fit or are redundant or extraneous (I’m sure no one thinks I ever edit or cut anything, but I really do. The next-to-next-to-the-last thing I do to a manuscript is a process called “slash and burn”). In most cases, though, those scenes can be recycled into the next book—one of the benefits of writing a series. For example, the brief scene involving Mayer Rothschild, the traveling numismatist, was originally written for Dragonfly. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit well there—but it wasn’t necessary to that story, so I removed it. And lo and behold, it tied in beautifully with the clue of the coins in Voyager, where I used it in almost the original version, making only small adjustments for the sake of the plot.
Then there are versions of things that simply don’t work—I rewrote the front half of the framing story for Dragonfly seven times before I was happy with it—keeping whatever small pieces seemed