Gabaldon is currently working on her ninth Outlander book, and said she’s currently re-reading its predecessor, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, because “there are pieces where I encounter, you know, an emotional thread that I had dropped in the last book. So, I will go back to read through it and pick that up so it will come into the new book with its original power.”
As for her writing schedule, she shared that, “When I decided to write a novel, I had two full time jobs and three children under the age of six, so I don’t want anyone telling me they don’t have time to write a book, but I learned to work in the middle of the night, and I still do that. So usually I’ll tuck my husband in bed around 9:00 or so, and then the dogs and I lie down on the couch for a bit, and I’ll fall asleep for an hour or two. And then I get up and the dogs get a bone. I get a Diet Coke. We go back to work until 4:00 in the morning. So that’s the main time. I can write at other times of the day, it’s just that’s when people leave me alone.” She went on to say that,
“I learned how to not have writer’s block when I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, because I did have terrible writer’s block on that, as anyone would. It was entitled Nest Site Selection of the Pinyon Jay, Gymnorhinus Cyanocephalus, or, as my husband says, “Why birds build nests where they do and who cares anyway.” [It was] the only time in my life I have ever had depression, but I had it then. Anyway, I quickly learned that […if I] spent the entire day reading “Nero Wolfe” mysteries, I would feel even more depressed. Whereas, if I could write down progress, if I could write analyze the data for figure 2.2, I would feel this surge of positive reinforcement.”
“So, I learned to force myself to write in order to report on it, as it were. I keep track of every single word I write. When I stop and go to the bathroom or whatever, I write at the top of my file how many words are in that file since the last time I logged off. And you can see the total mounting up little by little. Some days it’s 40 words. Some days it’s 1500, it’s whether I’m working on that scene or on several scenes at once. It’s which ones are working. Sometimes they just cut loose. Sometimes they don’t. Basically, the only bottom line is you just keep writing.”
