Outlander creator Diana Gabaldon knows good chemistry. And it has nothing to do with the three science degrees she holds.
The US-based writer created the best-selling books – partly set in the Scottish Highlands – on which the sizzling, time-travelling TV drama was based.
Fans around the world are treated to glimpses of Glencoe Visitor Centre, whose surrounding landscape features in the show’s opening credits. Culloden Moor battleground, Urquhart Castle and The Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore also feature.
The novels focus on an 18th Century Scottish warrior, ginger hunk Jamie Fraser, and Claire Randall, the married English Second World War nurse who falls hopelessly in love with him. And like her characters, Diana admits she has herself succumbed to similar temptation.
When we caught up with the multi-award-winning author, the long-awaited series seven of the TV series based on the novels was just about to launch in the US, hotly followed by the UK.
And she reveals it is her husband who was her greatest temptation, colouring the Outlander debut that published in 1991.
How Outlander writer Diana Gabaldon fell for a red-headed French horn player
Diana, now 71, smiles: “I was engaged to a nice young man when I was in college.
“About six months after we became engaged, I walked into the first day of marching band practice and sat down next to this tall, red-headed French horn player.
“At the end of that practice, I gave my fiance back his ring. I have been married to that French horn player for the last 51 years.”
Her Mr Right – Doug Watkins, with whom she has three grown-up children and two grandchildren – now finds his words dropping into the novels and scripts she writes for the TV series.
She smiles: “At the end of the fifth book, The Fiery Cross, Jamie says, ‘When I die, if my last words aren’t I love you, it’s because I didn’t have time’. This is something my husband said to me one morning.”
The writer was 36 when she began writing Outlander. “I love science and I am good at it,” says the former university professor. “But I knew from the age of eight I was meant to be a novelist. I also realised that it was an uncertain way to make a living.
“Both my parents grew up in the Depression and were very frugal, and so I didn’t tell them or my husband. I had two full-time jobs and three small children. He would have tried to stop me because he would fear I’d drop dead from exhaustion. But I was 35 and I knew if I didn’t write it then, I might never do it. It was to be a practice book, not for publication.”
It was the early days of personal computers, and her husband ran a software enterprise serving businesses. She was a trainer for the company and quickly realised the PC – as limited as it was then – was just what she needed to organise her “practice” novel.
But the book files she stored, titled Jamie, were discovered by her husband. “He looked at me and said, ‘Who’s Jamie?’” When she told him she says, laughing, “he cautiously began asking questions and reading off the screen in what he imagined to be a Scottish accent”.
Diana Gabaldon’s sci-fi inspiration for Outlander’s Jamie Fraser
The inspiration for Jamie came from a rerun of a 1960s Dr Who played by Patrick Troughton, with Frazer Hines appearing as kilted Highlander James Robert McCrimmon.
She says: “I was still thinking about that young man in a kilt the next day. I decided on 18th Century Scotland as a starting point for the book. But I needed at least one woman for the sexual tension. I sent this woman into a cottage where there were a lot of Scotsmen in kilts sitting around a fire.”
She explains that as one of the men stands to speak, the woman – Claire – demands, ‘who the hell are you?’ Gabaldon grins: “She didn’t sound at all like an 18th Century woman. I fought with her for several pages trying to beat her into shape, but she wasn’t having it.
“She just kept making modern remarks and started telling the story herself. So, I said, ‘alright, I’m not going to fight with you all the way through this book, go ahead and be modern, I’ll figure it out later’. And that is how she time travels.”
‘The moment I saw Scotland, I felt that I was home’
Gabaldon completed the debut, and, encouraged by a literary group, landed an agent, selling the book to a publisher in a three-way auction that led to a three-book deal. Almost seven books on, and now into the seventh TV series, she hasn’t looked back.
She says: “The moment I saw Scotland I felt that it was home. Having visited for
35 years I have a special feeling in my heart for the country and the Highlands. The history is amazing. Scotland is multi-faceted, it is like looking into a diamond.”
And while the country will always remain with her, the lovers who made her famous may not. The eighth season in the TV series will likely be the last she says, as may the 10th book featuring Jamie and Claire. “I am intending it to be the final one so that I can bring the series to a satisfying conclusion.”
And then, with a tantalising grin, she adds: “I wrote Outlander for practice. As I got to the third book in the three-book contract, I surprised the agent when I called to say, ‘I am afraid there is a fourth book’. So, perhaps the 10th may not be the last…”
The current series of Outlander is streaming on Lionsgate.
