The Companion to the Fiery Cross, a Breath of Snow and Ashes, an Echo in the Bone, and Written in My Own Heart's Blood

by Diana Gabaldon

  I used to print off all new work once a week, however incomplete, but have sort of lapsed on that, what with all the travel—I’m not invariably (or even often) home on the same day every week, and you really need to do this as a matter of weekly routine, if you’re going to go that far.

  Step 4: Put copies in different places. By which I mean, it will do you no good to have copies on two laptops, a thumb drive, an external drive, and a hard-copy dump, if your house burns down. Backing up work to a cloud service or emailing it to yourself is a safeguard against such a contingency—but I do have friends who put a copy of important work at a friend’s house (I have one friend who put her last book’s manuscript in her freezer, just in case of fire, flood, or burglary), or mail a hard copy to a relative.

  Really, you don’t need to do all these things. But for pity’s sake—do one of them.

  ROMANCE AND THE WRITTEN WORD

  Back in the day—say, around the sixteenth century—a work of entertainment called “a romance” meant essentially that it was a work of fiction. Comedy, tragedy, love story, adventure—if it wasn’t a factual account, it was a romance. And people were accused of being “romantical” when you thought they were lying or embellishing their accounts.

  This concept of “romance” continued past Shakespeare and all the way through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Robinson Crusoe is a romance—in spite of the fact that there are neither women nor love affairs in it); in the nineteenth, “romance” began to drift more in the direction of relationship stories—particularly those written by women, vide Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.

  In fact, the German word for a work of fiction—regardless of genre—is still “Roman.”

  But come the mid-twentieth century, and the word became solidified as meaning a very specific type of fiction: a courtship story, usually between a young man and an even younger woman, with a happy ending in which the couple are united in marriage and/or bed (hopefully in that order).

  “Romance,” in terms of story, no longer meant “excitement, adventure, fantastic experiences beyond the bounds of normal daily life.” It meant Love, in the sense of a pair bond.

  Now, as I’ve noted elsewhere,43 I wrote Outlander for practice and chose the broad general category of “historical fiction” on grounds that I was a research professor and knew my way around a library. As I wrote, though, I used any element, literary device, or classical trope that struck my fancy—and I read a lot, I like all kinds of things…and I used ’em all. After all, it didn’t matter what “kind” of book this was—no one was ever going to see it!

  Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that…Stuff happened, and I put a small bit of the book in the library of the CompuServe Literary Forum44 in order to win an argument with a man about what it feels like to be pregnant. Everyone who’d been following the argument went to read the piece and came back asking for more. So I’d put up bits and pieces now and then…and people began asking, “What sort of book is this?”

  “Beats me,” I’d reply, and go on working.

  But the forum folk, bless them, remained interested and helpful and after a time began suggesting things that my book might be. These suggestions varied wildly, depending on what bit I’d just posted, and ranged from mystery to fantasy to thriller to…romance.

  I’d read quite a lot of the earlier fiction that was called romance but somehow had never encountered a modern romance novel. “Really?” I said. “Well, who knows—maybe it is a romance.” So I went to the grocery store and picked three romance novels whose covers said they were New York Times bestsellers, figuring this should be a representative sample.

  By what I later realized was coincidence, all three of these novels featured an eighteen-year-old heroine who was raped. In two instances, she fell in love with the man who’d raped her (he being driven mad by her desirability and/or having married her by arrangement and then taken advantage of his marital rights). In the other, she was comforted and shown the true delights of sex by a nicer guy, whom she then married.

  While I found these books entirely entertaining—in one of them, the heroine is thrown across a table and taken by the hero, who courteously paused “to allow her to adjust to his size” (causing me to say out loud, “Yeah? So…how small is he?”)—I was pretty much convinced that whatever it was I was writing, it wasn’t a romance novel.

  Well, other Stuff happened, and in the fullness of time I acquired a literary agent, finished the book (in that order), and then got a publisher and an editor. Now, the book was acquired for Delacorte Press (a Random House imprint) by Jackie Cantor, a general-fiction editor who bought the book because she loved it.

  The publication process is a long and torturous one (ask any production person), but it begins with the editor who buys a book going to an editorial meeting, at which all the editors present their “list” of projects, reporting new acquisitions and progress on existing manuscripts, and where preliminary plans are laid for marketing, cover designs, and advertising budgets. Clearly an important occasion for a new book.

  So Jackie, bless her heart, took Cross Stitch45 to the editorial meeting, where she waxed enthusiastic about how wonderful this book was, how much she adored it, it was the best book she’d ever read, and they must do something Really Special for it.

  “Great!” said the assembled meeting. “What kind of book is it?”

  “Ahhh…” said Jackie.

  Without going into the gory details—it took them eighteen months to decide how the heck to sell a book that nobody could describe.46 Having no idea of the speed of publishing processes, I’d just been working along on the second—similarly genre-less—book,47 without the slightest idea that anything might be amiss.

  So one day my agent called and said, “Well, they’ve finally decided what to do with your book. The hardcover is no problem—it will just go up front with all the other hardcover fiction.48,49 But they think they’d like to sell the paperback as romance.”

  “As what?” I said. By this time I’d read quite a lot of romance novels, and while a number of them were well written and a larger number enjoyable, I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I’d written. “I have two objections to that: one, I will never be reviewed by The New York Times.50 I can live with that, but, two, that will cut off the entire male half of my readership. Men see different things in the book than women do, and I don’t want to lose that.”

  “Yes, I know,” said my (male) agent. “And we could insist that they publish it as science fiction or fantasy, because of the weird elements. But bear in mind that a bestseller in fantasy is fifty thousand in paperback—a bestseller in romance is five hundred thousand.”

  “You have a point,” I said, after a moment’s pause. “Sell it as romance.”

  Because, you see, my beloved editor had told me, “These have to be word-of-mouth books, because they’re too weird to describe to anybody.”

  That being so, I reasoned, obviously it was better to expose the book to half a million readers who would all go out and tell their friends—who would, presumably, be able to draw their own conclusions as to what the book was or wasn’t—than to start with a tenth that number.

  And so we agreed to allow Outlander’s paperback to be published as romance, but with the proviso that I would get dignified covers—no mad bosoms or writhing hair—and that, if the book(s) should become “visible” (publisher-ese for “hit the NYT Bestseller List”), they would at that point “reposition” the books as fiction.51

  So the hardcover was published. Now, at this point, there were two big bookstore chains: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, which both had stores in every mall in America52 and whose buyers held the power of life and death over all published books. The Waldenbooks buyer bought ten thousand copies for the chain, a very respectable number for a debut novel. The B. Dalton buyer bought three hundred copies. For the whole chain. This amounted to roughly one-quarter of a book per store, I estimated at the time.

  H
owever…those three hundred copies sold out. Reordered. Sold out and reordered again. At this point, the fiction buyer for B. Dalton said, “What’s this weird book that keeps popping up at the bottom of the list every month?” The buyer read it—and ordered ten thousand copies.

  In spite of the difficulties, the publisher manfully (and womanfully) set to and, as part of their support for the book, arranged to give away 1,200 hardcover copies at that year’s Romance Writers of America convention. This is a common thing for publishers to do at writers’ conventions of all kinds, in order to publicize new books or authors to a hard-core niche audience. What was unusual in this instance was that the book was a hardcover—and a big, fat, impressive-looking one, too—and at that point in time, romance novels were never published as anything but paperback originals.

  I went to the convention, having no idea what to expect, but was rather pleased to see big stacks of Outlander piled up behind the volunteers running the registration table. The volunteers were handing out goody bags filled with bookmarks, key chains, postcards, and other marketing tchotchkes, along with four or five paperback books. The hardcover wouldn’t fit conveniently in one of these bags, so they were handing it over to each attendee separately.

  So…I walked up to the registrar in charge of “F–N” and said “Gabaldon.”53 To which the volunteer responded, “How do you spell that?”54 I pointed at the gleaming pile of Outlanders behind her and said, “Like that.” Whereupon she rose to her feet, grabbed my hand, and clasped it to her bosom, exclaiming, “It’s you!”

  The book made quite an impression at that conference, though not always a favorable one. Quite a number of people paused in elevators and in hallways to tell me that they just couldn’t read “a book that big!” Other people told me they’d stayed up all night reading it—and before the three-day conference was over, the question of whether the book was or wasn’t a romance was already being hotly debated.

  Frankly, it is. It’s the only one of my novels that has the structure of a romance—which is to say, it is a courtship story, if hardly an orthodox one. It also has a happy ending. However, it has rather a lot of things that normal romance novels don’t usually have—and certainly didn’t have in 1991, I’ll tell you….

  Scarcely before the ink had dried on the pages, the question as to what the heck this was was being hotly debated in chat rooms and forums all over what wasn’t quite yet the Internet. Most “real” writers of romance were very firm in their insistence that it wasn’t a romance. It was Way Too Long, it had “all that boring history,” and the H/H55 didn’t even meet for fifty pages, and she had a husband, for heaven’s sake, and she was still in love with him, and…(horror of horrors), “The Hero beats the Heroine!” A good many readers—I’m told—gave up reading the book at this point, frequently throwing it against the wall (they told me) to emphasize their outrage.56 Allowing the Hero to be tortured and anally raped wasn’t nearly as bad as letting him smack the Heroine’s bottom, but that wasn’t anything you ought to find in a “normal” romance, either!57

  And…crime to end all crimes…I had written the book in the First Person!!! Honest. For years and years, I’d have total strangers come up to me at conferences (or in bookstores) and ask, lowering their voices in deference to implied scandal, “How did you dare to write in the first person?”58

  Any number of kindly romance writers assured me earnestly that you couldn’t do that. Readers didn’t like it. Editors didn’t like it.59 Romance readers don’t want to be the Heroine (I was told); they want to be her best friend and enjoy her adventure vicariously.

  To be perfectly honest, I wrote the book in the first person because it was the easiest thing to do. (Though if you care to make a brief survey of Great English Literature, you’ll find that about half the enduring books are in fact written in the first person, from Fanny Hill and Moby-Dick to David Copperfield and the lamentations of Jeremiah.)

  On the other hand…somebody seemed to be reading the book. The RWA has (as do other genre organizations) a prestigious award, called the Rita Award, given in a number of categories, and in 1991 Outlander was nominated in four of them.60

  At this point, I no longer recall what all four were, but I do recall telling my husband (who accompanied me to the awards banquet, bless him) that I wasn’t going to win any of them. All but one of the Rita awards were juried awards; a panel of six judges read all the nominated books in each category, and the total of their numbered scores determined the ranking of the books in that category.

  The judges—I served as a judge myself several times in later years—were given a set of scoring guidelines. You could give a book any number between 0 and 6, with 1 being “Really bad” and 6 being “I wish I’d written this myself!” Zero, though, meant, “This may be a great book, but it isn’t a romance.”

  I don’t know whether nominees are still given their scores afterward or not, but they were then. And, sure enough, my scores in all three judged categories were evenly divided between 0’s and 6’s.

  The fourth category, though, was different. For one thing, this was the sole award that was voted on by the membership at large, not by a panel of judges. For another, it didn’t depend on genre; any book could be nominated. It was called the “Best Book of the Year” award. Best Book, not Best Romance. I believe they revised that guideline after I won it and now require nominees to be romances—but win it I did.

  Needless to say, my editor, Jackie Cantor, was right about the book being word-of-mouth, and Outlander and I were notorious in the romance-writing community pretty much from the start. I got more so with the release of Dragonfly in Amber, which really wasn’t a romance, was still written mostly in the first person, didn’t even have a happy ending…and ended on a major-league cliff-hanger, to boot.61,62

  Still and all, I enjoyed—and still do enjoy—both romance novels and the people who write them. What I didn’t like was the popular misconception that all romances are illiterate bodice rippers, and that that being so…plainly that’s what I’d written.

  Now, that’s a double whammy of a misconception there: first, all romances aren’t That Sort of Book, but second—I don’t write romances to begin with, so why ought I to suffer a discrimination that doesn’t even belong to me?

  I was therefore left with the choice either of trying to defend the entire genre and raise it to an image of literary respectability—or find a way to separate my novels from the genre, insofar as was possible. I concluded pretty quickly that I had neither the stamina nor the desire to try to change the image of romance novels overall (there were a great many people already working on that, most of them with a lot more talent for such things than I have), so I’d best do the other thing.

  In this regard, I was hampered primarily by the behavior of Barnes & Noble. The big-box store had arisen, displacing the smaller mall stores, and B&N was the biggest of the boxes. It also has a top-down corporate model of marketing, wherein the powers at the top of the company construct a monthly “model” of which books are to be sold where, in what number, and where these are to be placed in B&N stores. And (I was told), since my first novel was a romance, therefore everything else I wrote for the rest of my life was a romance, too, as far as Barnes & Noble was concerned.

  Now, the publisher was as good as their word, and when Voyager hit the New York Times list in 1994, Bantam Doubleday Dell obligingly put foil strips over the flowers on my paperback covers and changed the stamp on the spine from Romance to Fiction. B&N went right on shoving the books into the romance section. And I got increasingly tired of people saying to me, “Oh, I don’t read that kind of book…” or (my husband’s oldest friend, in sympathetic tones), “It must get really tedious, writing those bodice busters.”63

  In the course of business and book tours, I went into a lot of bookstores, and in any independent store—or a mall store where the manager had discretion over where things were placed—I could pretty much get them to move my novels to fiction in the course of
a fifteen-minute visit. But not B&N, the eight-hundred-pound gorilla….

  So this went on for years. And then I accidentally wrote a novel about Lord John Grey.64 Now, Lord John is a thoroughly admirable man: honorable, witty, brave, a minor nobleman and career soldier, clever, adventurous…and homosexual, in a time when that particular proclivity was a capital offense. Thus, his stories always have an underlying thread of innate conflict and lurking danger, no matter what else is happening. What they don’t have is a heroine, or—at least in the first book—a love affair, or even any hetero sex. And yet B&N was shoving Private Matter in the romance section.

  I went into a dozen B&N stores in the course of a week of California book touring and got angrier and angrier. Finally, I decided that I wasn’t going to take this anymore, called my editor, and told her I wasn’t setting foot in another B&N store as long as they were putting Lord John in the romance section. Thus freed of the afternoon’s commitments, I left my hotel and went to walk up and down the sands of Half Moon Bay, fuming. And I made up my mind that I had nothing to lose.65

  So I went home and composed a rude letter to Steve Riggio, then the CEO of Barnes & Noble. It said (more or less):

  Dear Mr. Riggio,

  I assume that you might be familiar with my name, as it pops up at the top of bestseller lists whenever a new book of mine comes out.