{"id":157350,"date":"2021-12-07T08:37:45","date_gmt":"2021-12-06T21:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=157350"},"modified":"2021-12-13T08:04:44","modified_gmt":"2021-12-12T21:04:44","slug":"ten-terrifying-questions-with-diana-gabaldon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2021\/12\/07\/ten-terrifying-questions-with-diana-gabaldon\/","title":{"rendered":"Ten Terrifying Questions with Diana Gabaldon!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Diana<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, to celebrate the release of her ninth Outlander novel, Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone<\/a><\/strong> (our Book of the Month for December!), Diana Gabaldon takes on our Ten Terrifying Questions! Read on …<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n
\"Diana<\/a>

Diana Gabaldon (Photo by Barbara Schnell).<\/p><\/div>\n

1. To begin with, why don\u2019t you tell us a little bit about yourself \u2013 where were you born? Raised? Schooled?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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 \u2014 empowered by sheer desperation \u2014 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\u2019re Catholics; back in the day, we didn\u2019t eat meat on Fridays).)<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u2019t 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\u2019s just animal behaviour with a lot of statistics, don\u2019t worry about it \u2026). 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<\/em>* appointment at U.Penn.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Really, who\u2019s interested in this stuff? Still, you asked \u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. What did you want to be when you were twelve, eighteen and thirty? And why?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A novelist. I\u2019ve known since I was about eight that that\u2019s what I was meant to be; I just didn\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. What strongly held belief did you have at eighteen that you don\u2019t have now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That a boyfriend got to decide where we went on dates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. What are three works of art \u2013 this could be a book, painting, piece of music, film, etc \u2013 that influenced your development as a writer?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, man \u2026 thousands. Literally, thousands: books (my mother taught me to read at the age of three, and I\u2019ve never stopped), music (I met my husband \u2014 a real work of art \u2014 in the French Horn section of the NAU marching band), and thousands of paintings \u2014 I never met a museum I didn\u2019t like, and that predilection has grown to encompass art galleries as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Frankly, anything can (and does) influence a writer \u2014 most particularly, one\u2019s own life and experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Considering the many artistic forms out there, what appeals to you about writing a novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the one I\u2019m best equipped to do. I can paint and play music, but would never be more than a competent amateur. My gift is words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. Please tell us about your latest novel!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I\u2019ve just learned that it\u2019s #1 on the New York Times<\/em> list, USA Today<\/em>\u2019s bestseller list, the Indie Bookstores list and Bookscan \u2026 though I suppose that doesn\u2019t tell you a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

OK, then \u2014 Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone<\/em> is a Big Book (they all are, and in fact, this is not my longest book, at a mere 888 pages \u2026) and it deals with a lot of things, but primarily with loyalties. It\u2019s set in the latter days of the American Revolution (1779\/81), in the Southern colonies, so there\u2019s 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 \u2014 and between husband and wife (or ex-wives, as the case may be \u2026). And the loyalty between friends, strained \u2014 but maybe not fractured \u2014 by the violence that touches everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then there are the bigger and more abstract (perhaps) loyalties \u2014 between king and subjects, commander and men, and what happens when the existing social structures crumble.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. What do you hope people take away with them after reading your work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

An urgent desire to read the next one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Who do you most admire in the writing world and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. Many artists set themselves very ambitious goals. What are yours?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. Gabaldon\u2019s Three Rules for Becoming a Writer:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

  1. Read<\/li>
  2. Write <\/li>
  3. (most important!) DON\u2019T STOP!!!<\/li><\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Thank you for playing!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \u2014Go Tell the Bees that I am Gone<\/a><\/em> by Diana Gabaldon (Penguin Books Australia) is out now.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \"Go<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    A Q&A with the author of the bestselling Outlander series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":157351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[6676],"tags":[13722,1634,1974,14066,7161,4111,4212,5184],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/DianaGabaldon-Social.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157350"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":157645,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157350\/revisions\/157645"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}