Ten Terrifying Questions with Diana Gabaldon!

Diana Gabaldon is the author of the international bestselling Outlander novels and Lord John Grey series. Published in 42 countries and 38 languages, in 2014 the Outlander novels were made into an acclaimed TV series starring Sam Heughan as Jamie Fraser and Caitriona Balfe as Claire. The series has now been renewed for a fifth and sixth season. Diana lives with her husband and dogs in Scottsdale, Arizona and is currently at work on her ninth Outlander novel.

Today, to celebrate the release of her ninth Outlander novel, Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone (our Book of the Month for December!), Diana Gabaldon takes on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …

Diana Gabaldon (Photo by Barbara Schnell).

1. To begin with, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself – where were you born? Raised? Schooled?

I was born in Williams, Arizona. My parents actually lived in Flagstaff (thirty miles away), but the family doctor was having a feud with the Flagstaff hospital, and was thus obliged to practice out of the Williams hospital — thus obliging my very young parents (both 21 when I was born) to drive thirty miles over icy roads and flying snow on January 11th, in order to have me there. (My father, in later years, would describe how the car slid off the road twice, and he — empowered by sheer desperation — pushed it back on. Once hearing that I was safely born and greeting me (by report, I urinated on him in reciprocation), he then went out and in a spirit of total distraction, ate ham and eggs for supper (it was Friday and we’re Catholics; back in the day, we didn’t eat meat on Fridays).)

At the age of two days, though, I returned to Flagstaff with my parents, and grew up there. School? Nativity of the Blessed Virgin parochial school, grades 1-8 (I had to go to a public-school kindergarten, as there wasn’t a Catholic one, so I went to Emerson Elementary School, where my mother was a teacher (she taught second grade, not kindergarten)). Flagstaff Junior High and Flagstaff High School, then Northern Arizona University (also in Flagstaff) for a B.S. degree in Zoology, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (UCSD) for an M.S. in Marine Biology, and back to NAU to do a Ph.D. in Quantitative Behavioural Ecology (it’s just animal behaviour with a lot of statistics, don’t worry about it …). I came back to NAU because my not-yet-husband was still finishing his degree there, and it had occurred to me that if I pursued marine biology, there would be only six places I could live for the rest of my professional life. So I went back to Flagstaff and got married. (And finished my Phd., though I did my dissertation while in Philadelphia, doing a somewhat premature post-doc *cough* appointment at U.Penn.)

(Really, who’s interested in this stuff? Still, you asked …)

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?

A novelist. I’ve known since I was about eight that that’s what I was meant to be; I just didn’t know how.

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don’t have now?

That a boyfriend got to decide where we went on dates.

4. What are three works of art – this could be a book, painting, piece of music, film, etc – that influenced your development as a writer?

Oh, man … thousands. Literally, thousands: books (my mother taught me to read at the age of three, and I’ve never stopped), music (I met my husband — a real work of art — in the French Horn section of the NAU marching band), and thousands of paintings — I never met a museum I didn’t like, and that predilection has grown to encompass art galleries as well.

Frankly, anything can (and does) influence a writer — most particularly, one’s own life and experiences.

5. Considering the many artistic forms out there, what appeals to you about writing a novel?

It’s the one I’m best equipped to do. I can paint and play music, but would never be more than a competent amateur. My gift is words.

6. Please tell us about your latest novel!

Well, I’ve just learned that it’s #1 on the New York Times list, USA Today’s bestseller list, the Indie Bookstores list and Bookscan … though I suppose that doesn’t tell you a lot.

OK, then — Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone is a Big Book (they all are, and in fact, this is not my longest book, at a mere 888 pages …) and it deals with a lot of things, but primarily with loyalties. It’s set in the latter days of the American Revolution (1779/81), in the Southern colonies, so there’s the political strife of fractured loyalties to King and crown, and the turning of neighbour against neighbour (one recent description of it as a civil war between Tory and Whig is not at all wrong, thought rather simplified), the loyalties among the members of a family — and between husband and wife (or ex-wives, as the case may be …). And the loyalty between friends, strained — but maybe not fractured — by the violence that touches everything.

Then there are the bigger and more abstract (perhaps) loyalties — between king and subjects, commander and men, and what happens when the existing social structures crumble.

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?

An urgent desire to read the next one.

8. Who do you most admire in the writing world and why?

Again, thousands. But, for what it’s worth, my five literary role models (authors from whose style and work I learned specific craft when I began to write myself) are: Charles Dickens, John D. MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, Robert Louis Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse.

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?

The next page.

10. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Yes. Gabaldon’s Three Rules for Becoming a Writer:

1. Read
2. Write
3. (most important!) DON’T STOP!!!

Thank you for playing!

—Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone by Diana Gabaldon (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.

Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone

Outlander: Book 9

by Diana Gabaldon

Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising of 1745, and it took them twenty years to find each other again. Now the American Revolution threatens to do the same.

It is 1779 and Claire and Jamie are at last reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children on Fraser's Ridge. Having the family together is a dream the Frasers had thought impossible. Yet even in the North Carolina backcountry, the effects of war are being felt...

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