Diana Gabaldon didn't set out to write Outlander. She was practicing. She was writing a novel she never intended to publish, just to see if she could. And then something she wrote one afternoon changed everything — including your life, probably.

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Diana Gabaldon didn't set out to write Outlander. She was practicing. She was writing a novel she never intended to publish, just to see if she could. And then something she wrote one afternoon changed everything — including your life, probably.

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Diana Gabaldon Invented Jamie Fraser by Accident — The Story of How a Practice Novel Became the Biggest Romance Series of the Last 30 Years

Diana Gabaldon has said it many times, with the amused clarity of someone who has spent thirty years being asked to explain the inexplicable: she didn't set out to write Outlander.

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She was teaching herself how to write a novel. The first Outlander book — published in 1991, now the first entry in a nine-novel series with a tenth in progress — was, in its original conception, a practice exercise she never intended anyone to read.

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