The Outlandish Companion

Book by Gabaldon Diana

Prologue

Well, it was all an accident, is what it was. I wasn't trying to be published; I wasn't even going to show it to anyone. I just wanted to write a book--any kind of book.

Not actually any kind of book. Fiction. See, I'm a storyteller. I can't take any particular credit for this--I was born that way. When my sister and I were very young and shared a bedroom, we stayed up far into the night, nearly every night, telling enormous, convoluted, continuing stories, with casts of thousands (like I said, I was born with this).

Still, even though I knew I was a storyteller from an early age, I didn't know quite what to do about it. Writing fiction is not a clearly marked career path, after all. It's not like law, where you do go to school for X years, pass an exam, and bing! you can charge people two hundred dollars an hour to listen to your expert opinions (my sister's a lawyer). Writers mostly make it up as they go along, and there is no guarantee that if you do certain things, you will get published. Still less is there any guarantee that you'll make a living at it.

Now, I come from a very conservative background (morally and financially, not politically). My parents would take my sister and me out for dinner now and then, and while waiting for the food to be served, would point out the oldest, most harried looking waitress in the place, saying sternly, "Be sure you get a good education, so you don't have to do that when you're fifty!"

With this sort of nudging going on at home, it's no wonder that I didn't announce that I was moving to London to become a novelist right after high school. Instead, I got a B.S. in zoology, an M.S. in marine biology, a Ph.D. in ecology, and a nice job as a research professor at a large university, complete with fringe benefits, pension plans, etc. The only trouble was that I still wanted to write novels.

Now, I have had rather a varied scientific career, featuring such highlights as the postdoctoral appointment where I was paid to butcher seabirds (I can reduce a full-grown gannet to its component parts in only three hours. Oddly enough, I have yet to find another job requiring this skill), or the job where I tortured boxfish and got interrogated by the FBI (they didn't care about the civil rights of the boxfish; it was the Russian exchange scientist grinding up clams in my laboratory they were after). At the time when my desire to write novels resurfaced, though, I was working at Arizona State University, writing Fortran programs to analyze the contents of bird gizzards.

This was really an accident; I was supposed to be developing a research program dealing with nesting behavior in colonially breeding birds. However, I was the only person in my research center who had (and I quote the director) "a background in computers." At the time, said "background" amounted to one Fortran class, which I had taken in the College of Business in order to keep my husband company. However, as the director logically pointed out, this was 100 percent more computer knowledge than anyone else in the place had. I was therefore drafted to help with the analysis of ten years' worth of avian dietary data, using punch cards, coding sheets, and the university's mainframe computer. (In other words, this was long before the term "Internet" became a household word.)

At the conclusion of eighteen months of labor--which resulted in a gigantic eight-hundred-page coauthored monograph on the dietary habits of the birds of the Colorado River Valley--I said to myself, You know, there are probably only five other people in the entire world who care about bird gizzards. Still, if they knew about these programs I've written, it would save each one of those five people eighteen months of effort. That's about seven and a half years of wasted work. Why is there no way for me to find those five people and share these programs with them?

The net result of this rhetorical question was a scholarly journal called Science Software, which I founded, edited, and wrote most of for several years.1 A secondary result was that when my husband quit his job to start his own business and we needed more money, I was in a position to seek freelance writing work with the computer press.

I sent a query letter to the editors of Byte, InfoWorld, PC, and several other large computer magazines, enclosing both a recent copy of Science Software and a copy of a Walt Disney comic book I had written.2 The query said roughly, "As you can see from the enclosed, you'll never find anyone better qualified to review scientific and technical software--and at the same time, capable of appealing to a wide popular audience."

By good fortune, the microcomputer revolution had just bloomed, to the point where there actually was a fair amount of scientific and technical software on the market. And as one of perhaps a dozen "experts" in the newly invented field of scientific computation (it's really pretty easy to be an expert, when there are only twelve people in the world who do what you do), I got immediate assignments. It was in the course of one of these that a software vendor sent me a trial membership to CompuServe, for the purpose of mentioning a support forum the vendor maintained for the software I was reviewing.

I spent half an hour checking out the software support forum, and then--finding myself with several hours of free connect time in hand--set out to see what else might be available in this fascinating new online world. This being the mid-1980s, there was not nearly so much online as there is today (there was no World Wide Web; only the subscription services, such as CompuServe, Genie, and Prodigy. America Online didn't even exist yet). Still, among the resources available then (on CompuServe) was a group called the Literary Forum.

This was a fascinating group of individuals who all liked books. That was the only common denominator; the group included people of every conceivable background and profession--among them, a few published writers, a good many aspiring writers, and a great many nonwriters who simply liked to discuss books and writing. Finding this congenial gathering to be the ideal social life for a busy person with small children--something like a twenty-four-hour electronic cocktail party--I promptly signed up with CompuServe, and began logging on to the Literary Forum several times a day, to read and exchange posted messages with the kindred spirits there.

At this point in my life, I had a full-time job with the university, I was writing part-time for the computer press, and I had three children, ages six, four, and two. I'm not sure quite why I thought this was the ideal time to begin writing my long-intended novel--mania induced by sleep deprivation, perhaps--but I did.

I didn't intend to show this putative novel to anyone. It wasn't for publication; it was for practice. I had come to the conclusion--based on experience--that the only real way of learning to write a novel was probably to write a novel. That's how I learned to write scientific articles, comic books, and softvare reviews, after all. Why should a novel be different?

If I didn't mean to show it to anyone, it wouldn't matter whether what I wrote was bad or not, so I needn't feel self-conscious in the process of writing it; I could just concentrate on the writing. And, if it was just for practice, I needn't worry too much about what kind of novel it was. I made only two rules for myself: One, I would not give up, no matter how bad I thought it was, until I had finished the complete book, and two, I would do my level best in the writing, at all times.

So . . . what kind of novel should this be? Well, I read everything, and lots of it, but perhaps more mysteries than anything else. Fine, I thought, I'd write a mystery.

But then I began to think. Mysteries have plots. I wasn't sure I knew how to do plots. Perhaps I should try something easier for my practice book, then write a mystery when I felt ready for a real book.

Fine. What was the easiest possible kind of book for me to write, for practice? (I didn't see any point in making things difficult for myself.)

After considerable thought, it seemed to me that perhaps a historical novel would be the easiest thing to try. I was a research professor, after all; I had a huge university library available, and I knew how to use it. I thought it seemed a little easier to look things up than to make them up--and if I turned out to have no imagination, I could steal things from the historical record.3

Okay. Fine. Where to set this historical novel? I have no formal background in history; one time or place would do as well as another.

Enter another accident. I rarely watch TV, but at the time I was in the habit of viewing weekly PBS reruns of Doctor Who (a British science-fiction serial), because it gave me just enough time to do my nails. 4 So, while pondering the setting for my hypothetical historical novel, I happened to see one very old episode of Doctor Who featuring a "companion" of the Doctor's--a young Scottish lad named Jamie MacCrimmon, whom the Doctor had picked up in 1745. This character wore a kilt, which I thought rather fetching, and demonstrated--in this particular episode5--a form of pigheaded male gallantry that I've always found endearing: the strong urge on the part of a man to protect a woman, even though he may realize that she's plainly capable of looking after herself.

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, an agent can negotiate a much better contract than you can."

"Fine," I said. "How do I find an agent?"

"Well . . ." they said, "you're nowhere near finished with the book, you say, so you have plenty of time. Why don't you just ask around? Find out which agents handle what, who has a good name in the industry, who you should keep away from, and so on."

So I did. I listened to the stories of published authors, I asked questions, and after several months of such casual research, I thought I had found an agent who was a good prospect. His name was Perry Knowlton, and he appeared to be both reputable and well-known in publishing. Still better, he appeared to have no objection either to unorthodox books or to very long books--both of which, it dawned on me, I had.

However, I had no idea how to approach this man. I had heard that he didn't accept unsolicited queries, and he wasn't available online. Still, I was a long way from finished with the book, so I kept asking questions.

I was conversing one day (via posted messages) with an author I knew casually, named John Stith, who writes scientific fiction/mysteries, and asked him if he could tell me about his agent, if he had one.

John replied that he did have representation--Perry Knowlton. "Would you like me to introduce you to him?" John asked. I know you're nearly ready to look for an agent."

Presented with this gracious offer, I swallowed hard, and said weakly, "Er . . . that'd be nice, John. Thanks!"

John then sent a note to Perry, essentially saying that I might be worth looking at. I followed this with my own query, explaining that I had been selling nonfiction (and comic books) for some years, but that now I was writing fiction and I understood that I really needed a good agent. He had been recommended to me by several writers whose opinions I respected; would he be interested in reading excerpts of this rather long novel I had? (I didn't tell him I wasn't finished writing the thing yet; "excerpts" were all I had.)

Perry kindly called and said yes, he'd read my excerpts. I sent him the miscellaneous chunks I had,...