Here’s a video of Diana Gabaldon at EW PopFest
From EW
Author Diana Gabaldon took a break from working on the ninth novel in the wildly popular historical fiction series and stopped by EW PopFest on Sunday, where she spoke to EW’s Lynette Rice (who wore a fantastic Outlander cloak!) and answered fan questions about all things Claire and Jamie. Read on for our eight best takeaways from the lively Q&A.
How she got started
Gabaldon says she’s known since she was eight years old that she was a writer: “Eight was about the age age I was when I realized that people actually produced books, they didn’t just spring out of the library shelves.” But she certainly didn’t begin Outlander thinking it would become a literary (and television) phenomenon.
“I wrote the first book for practice; I wasn’t going to show it to anyone,” she said. But after having an argument with a man about what it feels like to be pregnant, she shared a piece she had written describing the feeling in detail. When people encouraged her to expand upon it — “this is like heroin to a writer, to have people actually want to read what you write” — she shared her work, piece by piece. “I discovered that, given the indescribable nature of what I write, the only way to sell it is to give people free samples.”
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