Outlander Author Diana Gabaldon on What Claire and Jamie Would Be Doing During Quarantine
This period of social distancing isn't exactly going how Outlander author Diana Gabaldon planned.
"To a writer, social distancing is just like normal life," she says. "We pretty much would like to be alone in our homes for long periods of time. So aside from not going out to restaurants to eat, I can't say that there's much change, by and large."
But in late April, she fell and broke her shoulder. "For the last week or so, my life has been even slightly more constrained because I tripped over two dogs and a garden hose and broke my right shoulder," she says. "I am slightly immobile."
Pre-accident, she had been focusing on finishing Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone, the ninth book in her Outlander series, and one that fans are eagerly awaiting. That wait is almost over.
"It will be finished within the next couple of months, assuming I don't fall down and break something else," Gabaldon says. But don't expect a publication date over the summer.
"As my husband often says, 'To a writer, finished is a relative term.' And it really is. There's finished—we type the end—but then you read it over again, and you find things that you want to add or take out, and so forth." And that's not even considering how the ongoing coronavirus crisis will impact the publishing industry, and potentially the publication date of Bees.
But before the pandemic forced us all into isolation, Gabaldon wrote an episode of Outlander, adapting her own source material for the screen, and ahead of the "Journeycake" premiere, she spoke with Town & Country about what writing for the TV show was really like.
Here, she shares a scene that got deleted, muses on what Jamie and Claire would be doing in quarantine, and hints at when viewers might get to see the character of Malva.
First things first, what would Claire and Jamie be doing during quarantine?
Much like me, they live in a remote part of the country. [Gabaldon lives in Scottsdale, Arizona.]
And as long as the neighbors are not coming by to borrow sugar, their life is probably fairly secluded. There's a lot of social distance on the Ridge.
On the other hand, they do have gatherings, so it would probably require putting off communal affairs like hog butchering. But there's a certain rhythm to rural life, in that you have to take care of things when they happen. If your hay becomes ripe, you're going to go out and harvest it. There's a certain amount of risk, but given the sort of risks that they're running in that life anyway, I don't think an epidemic the level of this one would have much impact on them.
Tell me how you ended up writing an episode this season.
It was more logistics than anything else. I was talking with [Outlander showrunner]Matt Roberts, and we were discussing whether I would like to write an episode for the season. And I said, "I'd love to write an episode—can we make it one of the later episodes of the season, though?" because I had hopes of actually finishing Bees before we got to that point.
That's why I took episode 11. It was the last one that was not the finale, which of course they wanted to write themselves.
The back half of season five is delving into book six, A Breath of Snow and Ashes. What do you think of the shifting timeline of the show?
Given what they're dealing with in terms of constraints and space, I think it makes all kinds of sense because I have storylines that can stretch out for three or four books. It's a coherent storyline, so I don't see any problem really in lifting pieces of the storyline from one book and condensing them with the earlier pieces from another book in order to make a contiguous line.
Like Stephen Bonnet's story, for instance, which has now concluded. That actually has a lot more impact in television terms, because you're seeing him pop up fairly frequently, and you don't have time to forget him. Whereas in the books, one of the reasons they're so long is because you need a certain amount of memory reinforcement for people who have not read the latest book for a couple of years.
Was there a particular scene in this episode that you were particularly excited to adapt for the screen?
There were three, actually. Two of them were iconic scenes from the books, so that wasn't a matter of adaptation. It was more like how much of each scene can we use, because there is limited time. So I put in the whole scene [from the book], and they would trim pieces off of it.
The first scene that comes to mind is the scene with the microscope. They trimmed off the last bit of dialogue, and people probably miss that, but they'll enjoy the scene, regardless.
And then there's the window sill scene, of course, which I had a lot of fun with. That comes before the microscope scene, for obvious reasons...
But then, there was another scene that was original to the show. It's one of my favorite scenes from this episode mostly because it was so well acted by Sam and Sophie. Jamie gives Brianna William's picture, and she says, "Who's this?" And he says, very bluntly, "It's your brother."
It's a deeply, deeply emotional, but very low-key conversation that is so moving. I thought they just nailed it. I’ve gone back and watched that particular scene a dozen times, at least.
When writing for TV, do you hint at the more in-depth stories in the book? With episode 511, I’m thinking of Ian’s depression, which hasn’t fully been explained on the show, but obviously book readers will know more about that situation.
Script-writing for television is a great collective enterprise. So while the script writer has a lot of power and can certainly put his or her own personal stamp and a sense of emotion into an episode, you are working from a blueprint, so to speak. [The executive producers] give you this list and say, "We need to do all of this."
And they have it planned—we need these elements coming out of the previous episodes that you have to work with and we need you to end this episode with these elements that can be used in the next episode. And as they go along, people take things out. People pull them back in.
So with regard to Ian, the first discussion was that they wanted Ian's past to be hinted at, and said, "We want some sort of concrete hint as to what has happened to him without actually telling the story."
So I had written a brief scene in which Ian is coming home to the Ridge. And he stops at a distance and is just sitting there, looking at the light from the windows, and obviously feeling outside and lonely. I had written in a brief flashback at that point, where we see him with the Mohawk. He was in a wood and looking out through the leaves at something. And we just see a close up of a woman's hands folding back a deer hide from the face of a dead baby, and then folding it back over and putting it in a tree limb. They thought that was too explicit, so they took it out. The line: “It's something between a man and his wife” is as close as they wanted to go.
Fans love to talk about the differences between the show and the books. And one thing they've really latched on to this season is that Malva [a character in the books who serves as Claire’s medical assistant on the Ridge] hasn’t part of the story. What do you think about that?
I think I'm not allowed to talk about season six, is what I think.
Alright, I'll take that as enough of a hint! Would you be interested in continuing to write for the TV show in season six?
Oh, yes. Yes, I would. It's completely different from writing a novel, but it's a lot of fun.
Outlander airs Sunday nights on Starz.
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