The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [208]
All writers are different in their approaches to writing, but for me, it’s a very organic sort of process, though with its own internal logic—something like growing crystals in the basement.
Q: Do your readers give you ideas?
A: Well, in all honesty, not often. Or rather, they don’t give me specific ideas, though often enough, a conversation will trigger a train of thought that eventually results in something—though it may not be at all what the original suggester had in mind! I generally know the shape of the story, if not the specifics, and I know the characters in such a way that I can say that yes they would do this, no they wouldn’t do that, under any circumstances. The only cases I can recall where a suggestion resulted in a specific scene were from a couple of my LitForum (CompuServe) friends—both people I’ve known for years, who’ve watched the development of the books and characters from the earliest days.
For example, one woman asked me—half-kiddingly—what I thought Jamie would say, think, or do if he came forward in time and saw his daughter in a bikini. Now, there’s no way he can travel forward in time, but the question did spark a train of thought that led to that conversation by moonlight in Voyager, and Claire’s letter to her daughter.
Q: Why is Outlander written in the first person point of view?
A: My initial impulse is to say, “Why on earth shouldn’t it be?” However, I do get this question quite often at writers conferences, so I’ll try to go into a bit more detail.
I like to experiment and try new and interesting things in terms of structure and literary technique (not that writing in the first person is what you’d call madly adventurous). However, the answer is simply that a first person narrative was the easiest and most comfortable for me to use at the time, and since I was writing the book for practice, I saw no reason to make things complicated.
Now that I know more about writing, there are other good reasons to have done it, but that’s why I did it at the time; it felt natural to me. I think I may have felt most comfortable with this (aside from the minor fact that Claire Beauchamp Randall took over and began telling the story herself); because many of my favorite works of literature are first person narratives.
If you look at the classic novels of the English language, roughly half of them are written in the first person, from Moby-Dick to David Copperfield, Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island—even large chunks of the Bible are written in the first person!28
Which is not to say that there are no drawbacks to using this technique, or that it suits everyone. But if it fits your style and your story, why on earth not?
The framing story of Dragonfly is written partly in Claire’s first person voice, partly in the third person voice of Roger Wakefield. And, if you look at the first half of Voyager, you’ll see that it’s done in a “braided” technique, telling Jamie’s story in third person in a linear chronology, Claire’s story in first person backward, in flashback, and using the sections in Roger’s voice as the turning points that trigger the other two voices.
Drums, in turn, uses four main narrative voices: Claire, Jamie, Roger, and Brianna.30 Still, Claire’s voice is by far the most comfortable for me to use.
Q: What have been the most difficult sections for you to write?
A: Difficult? Goodness, all of them. Well, not really, but writing is hard work, you know, even though a great deal of fun. As for emotional difficulty, which is what I suspect you mean—Claire’s farewell letter to Bree, the rape scene in Outlander, the farewell scene in Dragonfly in Amber, the “Away in a Manger” scene in Drums, and a few others that don’t come immediately to mind. The ones you’d expect, in other words.
Q: Are all the locations used in the books real?
A: I suppose that depends a bit on what you mean by “real.” They’re all certainly real to me. However, places like Inverness, Loch Ness, and Fort William are real in the map sense as well, as are Paris, Fontainebleau,