Get to Know Your Romance Authors: Diana Gabaldon

If you’ve read any of Gabaldon’s popular novels, you’ll recognize this image as something that could have come right out of her breakthrough novel Outlander, a time-travel romance set in Scotland during the 18^th century.  Gabaldon (pronounced GAB-uhl-dohn (long O) is known for her detailed attention to Scottish history, and the timeless (and steamy) romance she created between lusty 18^th century Jamie Fraser and modern English woman Claire Randall.  Gabaldon is also known for the enormous size of her novels – Outlander alone is almost 900 pages!  Every page well worth it her fans will tell you.  This particular series has six installments (all of gargantuan size) and readers still can’t get enough.  Below are a few things you may not know about Gabaldon. 

Meet Diana

Diana Jean Gabaldon (Watkins) was born in January 11, 1952 in Arizona.  She currently lives in Arizona with her husband Doug Watkins and they have three children.  Something that might shock you is that Diana Gabaldon has three degrees and none of them in English!  She has a bachelors in zoology, a masters in marine biology, and a PHd in Ecology! It’s no wonder her books consistently reach into the 800 page range with that kind of a research background.  In the 1970's she wrote comic books for Disney before becoming a professor of Environmental Studies at Arizona State.  She went on to start and run a scholarly journal called Science Software for several years.  You can find Gabaldon on Compuserve where she is a section leader for "Writers Forum", which is part of the "Readers and Writers Ink" Group.  Her section is called "Research and Craft of Writing".  You can also checkout her website to see what she's up, find links to interviews, information about book tours and so much more. 

Her Fiction

One fan pointed out  “the first thing you notice about 'Outlander', long before the castles-and-moors part starts to kick in, is that it's a carefully written book, with three-dimensional characters inhabiting a complex, believable world. The people in "Outlander" seem to have lives. The story seems light-handed and plausible. Events seem to happen for reasons and not simply to push the plot forward.”

Gabaldon has an uncanny way of straddling many genre’s at a time with her blockbuster fiction.  She is at once writing Romantic fiction, historical fiction, and science fiction.  This has earned her both scores of atypical fans (as well as many traditional romance reading fans) and several critics.

These excerpts from her website will hopefully answer some questions you had about Gabaldon.

Interviewer: Why did you choose Scotland during the Jacobite period as the setting for your books?

Gabaldon: Well, it was an accident. I was looking for a time in which to set a historical novel, because I thought that would be the easiest for me to write (I..(ahem)...do know how to do research). While pondering, I happened to see a rerun of an ancient Dr. Who episode on PBS--one in which the Doctor had a young Scottish sidekick, picked up in 1745. The sidekick was a cute little guy, about 17, named Jamie MacCrimmon, and he looked rather nice in his kilt. And I was sitting in church thinking about it, and said, "Well, you've got to start somewhere, and it doesn't really matter where, since no one's ever going to see this--so why not? Scotland, 18th century." And that's where I started--no outline, no characters, no plot--just a place and time.

Gabaldon: I don't like genre labels in the first place; I would much rather have my books taken on their own terms--I think they're kind of unique, and don't belong to any genre at all. But the way the publishing industry works, books need to have some kind of label in order to facilitate their being sold.

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