Diana Gabaldon Originally Intended Not to Have Anyone Ever Read ‘Outlander’

Diana Gabaldon didn’t start writing her first novel until she was in her mid-30s. It was the late 1980s, and at the time she was a professor at Arizona State University. She says she had dreams of writing a novel since she was a little girl, and when she turned 35, she decided it was time to pursue it. Her very first book would eventually become Outlander. But if she would have stuck to her original plan, no one would have ever read it.

Diana Gabaldon wanted to write a ‘straight historical novel’

Gabaldon says that when she started writing Outlander, her intention was for it to be a “straight historical novel.” But on her third day of writing, she introduced the character of Claire who “wouldn’t cooperate.”

“Dougal asked her who she was, and without my stopping to think who she should be, she drew herself up, stared belligerently at him and said ‘Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp. And who the hell are you?’ She promptly took over the story and began telling it herself, making smart-ass modern remarks about everything,” Gabaldon explains on her website.

“At which point I shrugged and said, ‘Fine. Nobody’s ever going to see this book, so it doesn’t matter what bizarre thing I do–go ahead and be modern, and I’ll figure out how you got there later.’ So the time travel was all her fault.”

The author originally intended not to have anyone ever read ‘Outlander’

The reason Gabaldon thought that no one would ever see the book is that her plan was for Outlander to be a practice exercise. Basically, she wanted to teach herself how to write a novel without anyone ever reading it.

“So I decided to write a novel, in order to learn how. I didn’t intend to try to publish this novel (I had no reason to think it would be any good, for one thing), nor did I mean to tell anyone what I was doing,” Gabaldon told ClanFraser.org.

However, after she got into an argument with a man on an online forum about what pregnancy feels like, Gabaldon decided to publish an excerpt from her draft that featured a character explaining in vivid detail what her pregnancy was like. 

“I posted a piece of the book in the CompuServe Literary Forum in order to win an argument I was having with a man about how it feels to be pregnant. A lot of people who’d been following the argument read the piece (it’s the bit from Outlander, where Jenny explains to Jamie what it feels like), and they all said, ‘Hey, this is good! What is it and where’s some more?'” Gabaldon explained.

Diana Gabaldon scored a three-book deal after sharing her ‘Outlander’ excerpts’

The author continued to share more Outlander excerpts, which led to an author named John Stith introducing her to his agent. 

“The agent took me on, on the basis of an unfinished manuscript, and once I did finish it, sent it to five editors whom he thought might like it. Four days later, three of them had called back wanting to buy it, and we were kind of off to the races,” Gabaldon recalled.

Her agent told the interested publishers that there was more to the story, and that prompted them to ask for a trilogy. This is Gabaldon’s origin story of how she bec

“So they gave me a three-book contract and bing! I was a novelist. Mind you, this process–posting, conversations, agent-finding, etc.–took nearly a year of online interaction… But that’s essentially it,” Gabaldon concluded.

Outlander Season 7 premieres this summer on Starz.