I'm a really slow writer. What I need to start writing on any given day, is a kernel, a line of dialogue, anything I can sense concretely.
I discovered that, given the indescribable nature of what I write, the only way to sell it is to give people free samples.
For months, people have been asking my views about the Scottish independence referendum, and I've been saying, 'It's not my country; I don't live here. Much as I love Scotland, I think it would be inappropriate to express a personal opinion regarding Scottish politics'.
I've never been willing to commit to more than one at a time, because I just don't know - I don't plan the books out ahead of time. So I have no idea how much ground we'll cover.
I will literally read anything, regardless of genre, fiction or non-fiction, as long as it's well written.
Mid-afternoon, I'll go out and do the household errands, come home, do my gardening, go for an evening walk.
It takes me about three years to write a book. They're very complex, and they take a lot of research, but also because the more popular your books get, the more popular you get, and people want to haul you off and look at you.
When I turned 35, I thought, 'Mozart was dead at 36, so I set the bar: I'm going to start writing a book on my next birthday.' I thought historical fiction would be easiest because I was a university professor and know my way around a library, and it seemed easier to look things up than make them up.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.
I write where I can see things happen, and then things get glued together. I do have the final scene, but that really is an epilogue. It's not part of the plot.
We started watching 'Doctor Who' as a family because our first daughter was a cranky baby, and she would get up during the night - and it was her dad's job to stay up because I worked at night.
I read all the time. People ask, 'Do you read while you work?' And I say, 'I better.' I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can't go that long without reading.
The only thing I knew about novels from a technical point of view was that they should have conflict.
In 18th-century Scotland, the main event was the Jacobite rebellion under Bonnie Prince Charlie, so that seems like a nice dramatic backdrop.
You won't have a story unless you have conflict, which means if there's no conflict in a situation, people look for a way to make some.
Some time later, long after 'Voyager' was published, I came across the Dunbonnet in another reference, and it gave an expanded version, and it told me the Dunbonnet's name - which was James Fraser.
I do recall loving 'All Quiet on the Western Front,' and I know I read it in a schoolroom, but I think I was in the sixth grade at the time, so it probably wasn't assigned reading.
Whenever you're dealing with something that's difficult to describe, that you can't get across to someone in a sound bite, it sounds like the normal default is to pick what's easiest, and in the case of fiction written by women, fiction involving women, fiction involving any sort of relationship, the word that comes to mind is 'romance.'