The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [4]
I was sitting in church the next day, thinking idly about this particular show (no, oddly enough, I don’t remember what the sermon was about that day), when I said suddenly to myself, Well, heck. You want to write a book, you need a historical period, and it doesn’t matter where or when. The important thing is just to start, somewhere. Okay. Fine. Scotland, eighteenth century.
So I went out to my car after Mass, dug a scrap of paper out from under the front seat, and that’s where I began to write Outlander; no outline, no plot, no characters—just a time and a place.
The next stop was plainly the Arizona State University library, where I went the next day. I began my research by typing SCOTLAND HIGHLANDS EIGHTEENTH CENTURY into the card catalog—and one thing led to another.6
I had not the slightest intention of telling my online acquaintances in the Literary Forum what I was up to. I didn’t want even the best-intentioned of advice; I wanted simply to figure out how to write a novel, and was convinced that I must do this on my own—I’d never asked anyone how to write a software review or a comic book script, after all, and I didn’t want anyone telling me things before I’d worked out for myself what I was doing.
So I didn’t say anything. To anybody. I just wrote, a bit every day, in between the other things I was doing, like changing diapers and writing grant proposals.
Some eight months along in this process I found myself one night having an argument with a gentleman in the Literary Forum, about what it felt like to be pregnant.7 He asserted that he knew what this was like; his wife had had three children.
I laughed (electronically) and replied, “Yeah, buster. I’ve had three children!”
To which his reply was, “So tell me what you think it’s like.”
Now, among the fragments of the story that I had so far was one short piece in which a woman (Jenny Murray) tells her curious brother (Jamie Fraser) what it feels like to be pregnant. Since this piece seemed to sum up the experience with more eloquence than I could manage in a brief posted message, I told my correspondent that I had a “piece” explaining the phenomenon, and that I’d put it in the Literary Forum Library.8
Most conversations on CompuServe forums are public; that is, posted messages are visible to everyone, unless they’ve been marked as private (in which case, they’re visible only to the participants). Anyone may enter a “thread” (a series of bulletin-board-like messages and replies on a given topic) as they like.9 A number of people had been following the pregnancy argument, and so when I posted my “piece” in the library, they went and read it.
Several of them came back and left messages to me, saying (in effect), “This is great! What is it?”
To which I cleverly replied, “I don’t know.”
“Well, where’s the beginning?” they asked.
“I haven’t written that yet,” I answered.
“Well… put up more of it!” they said.
So I did. Let me explain that I not only don’t write with an outline, I don’t write in a straight line. I write in bits and pieces, and glue them together, like a jigsaw puzzle. So whenever I had a “piece” that seemed to stand on its own, without too much explanation, I’d post it in the library. And gradually, people began to talk about my pieces, and to ask me about the book that was taking shape. Eventually, they said to me, “You know, this stuff is good; you should try to publish it.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “It’s just for practice, and I don’t even know what kind of book it is.” (What with the time travel and the Loch Ness Monster and a few other things, I sort of didn’t think it was a historical novel anymore, but I had no idea what it might be instead.) “On the other hand … if I wanted to publish it, what should I do?”
“Get an agent” was the prompt response from several published authors with whom I had become friendly. “An agent can get you read much faster than if you submit the manuscript yourself, and if it does sell,