Diana Gabaldon doesn't outline, and she doesn't start at chapter one. She writes whatever scene is vivid to her that day, in whatever order it arrives, then fits the pieces together once she has enough of them. The Outlander series was built this way, one fragment at a time.

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She writes without an outline, drafting scenes out of order and stitching them together later.
She calls Outlander her practice book and says there's no single right way to write one, per her own account at dianagabaldon.com.

No Straight Line, No Outline

Gabaldon has been open about the fact that she never planned the Outlander books in advance. She doesn't work from a chapter list or a synopsis, and she often doesn't know how a story ends while she's writing the middle of it. In a Collider interview she put it plainly.

I don't write in a straight line and I don't plan stories out ahead of time. I, in fact, don't actually know what's going to happen in a book.

Diana Gabaldon, Collider interview

Instead of building an outline, she writes in fragments. She has described the process as seeing moments here and there, writing them down, and letting the connective tissue grow between them over time. On her own website she compares the arranging to turning a kaleidoscope, rotating the pieces until the pattern makes sense. The scenes act like anchors, and the rest of the book fills in around them.

The stitching happens later. Once she has a critical mass of scenes, she looks for the joins, the spots where one piece can lead into another, and writes the bridges that connect them. A book comes together in clumps that slowly merge, rather than in a single line drawn from the first page to the last.

Where the Method Came From

Gabaldon started writing fiction as an experiment. She held a PhD in quantitative behavioral ecology and worked as a research professor at Arizona State University, where she became an expert in scientific computation. In 1988 she decided to write a novel purely for practice, with no plan to show it to anyone. That freedom is part of why the loose, out-of-order method stuck. Because nobody was going to read it, she felt free to write scenes in any sequence she liked. By the time Outlander reached print in 1991, the practice novel had become the opening of a series that now runs to nine published books, with a tenth in progress.

Her characters arrive the same unplanned way. Gabaldon sorts them into what she calls onions, mushrooms, and hard nuts. Onions are people she grasps at once, who gain layers the more she writes them. Mushrooms pop up out of nowhere and walk off with a scene. Hard nuts stay closed until she works at them long enough to crack them open. None of that comes from a character sheet drawn up in advance. It emerges on the page.

The approach also fits how her books get made now. She posts excerpts called Daily Lines on social media while a book is underway, small pieces pulled from wherever she happens to be working, which mirrors the piecemeal way the chapters actually come together.

For the full picture, see the full Diana Gabaldon writing routine.

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