01/28/2025
As part of the Sudden Storm (wasn't that the title of an old soap opera? Or was it "The Gathering Storm"? My parents both worked in the school system (principal and teacher, though not the same school) and so hired a housekeeper who would be there for the couple of hours between our arrival from school and our mother getting home--her name was Annie Mae, and she was wonderful. She also watched soap operas while ironing, which is how I come to know that...)----
Anyway, someone on another site had posted a link to an article from tvinsider [ (https://www.tvinsider.com/1171710/outlander-season-8-faith-alive-brianna-brian-meet-master-raymond-claire-jamie/) ], which I gather quoted Matt Roberts as saying that when I say no they (the production people) listen to me and don't do things that I strongly disagree with.
That's what caused me to write the Following, just by way of explanation and exegesis, because most people know nothing about the hows and whys of television (there's no reason why they should, after all).
Hence my reply:
Dear X--
Well, naturally he's not going to say in public that they ignore my advice (and objections) when it suits them, though very plainly they do.
People who work in show business are, as a rule, _very_ circumspect in what they say, because there's a really strong probability of it showing up in print (and what shows up will not necessarily be what the quotee actually _said_, either. Often things are paraphrased, and paraphrased (or condensed) in a way that is actually at odds with the original statement).
I try not to do that, either: a) I actually like the show's production people, and believe that they are in fact usually doing what they think is the right (or necessary*) thing, and b) I'd quite like to keep on working with them. They do, by contract, have to pay me a consultant's fee; they don't have to send me scripts or talk to me, let alone invite me to write the occasional episode.
And c) I have enough experience with the media (thirty-three years of it, in fact...) to understand i) how it works, and ii) how it _doesn't_.
Let me just observe that in thirty-odd years of being interviewed about my books, I have seen exactly _three_ interviews that were accurate. (I don't accuse the interviewers of deliberate messing-aboutness; a lot of it is just minor carelessness (they read my Wikipedia page--which is Totally Not Accurate to begin with, since I have neither the time nor interest to visit it every day and correct the nonsense people put in there--and use that as background; or they ask me minor things (like where I got my various degrees) and--not realizing that there are THREE state universities in Arizona, and all three of them include "Arizona" and "University" in their names--and I have two degrees from one of these institutions (Northern Arizona University), but worked for twelve years at one of the others (Arizona State University)--they more often than not default to the one university (University of Arizona) with which I've never had the slightest relationship.)
None of that's at all important; it's just a very minor illustration of how easy it is for a print version of a verbal interview to end up implying something different than what the person actually said (or meant). And it's counterproductive to all concerned for there to be an appearance of serious disagreement among the people associated with a show. (This is why actors, directors, etc. seldom bad-mouth each other (or the show's production), regardless of whether there's actual friction. And usually, there’s not.)
* "necessary" - NOT infrequently, there are actual unavoidable physical reasons for the show doing something in a way that ideally, they wouldn't have. For instance, I'm seeing a good bit of email from people who live near Monmouth, complaining that while EVERYONE knows (and it's certainly part of the historical record) that the Battle of Monmouth was fought in the summer and was remarkable for the heat of the day, the show has arbitrarily decided to shoot it in _winter_, ferGawd'ssake, and how could I "let" them do that?
O. K. There's no reason why most TV viewers should know anything about the mechanics of television production, and most of them don't. However, part of said mechanics deals with the shooting schedule.
(This is one of the reasons for shooting two episodes as a block; so that dates and locations can be shuffled in case of need.) A shooting schedule normally proceeds from Episode One onward. The only (well, normally) reason why episodes would be shot out of sequence would be in case of an important location that covered more than one episode--hence the show spending a couple of months in South Africa, in order to shoot pieces of Season Three.)
So the Battle of Monmouth falls at the end of Season Seven. They're filming it in Scotland. The end of the season is in fall; it's frequently Very Cold, but it's seldom hot, and when it is, it's unpredictable. There's no economically/physically reasonable way of making a whole battle look like it's having heat-stroke, and--given that the people who _know_ it was hot during the battle number maybe a couple of hundred at most—and the fact that the heat does not really affect any of the characters they’re using--they just let it be cold. I mean, producing a show is always about picking your battles ("battles" used in the broadest sense, meaning encompassing weather and locations, and unpredictable availability of cast or resources).
Now, returning to Matt --we get along very well, and always have. I visited the (hugely expanded) studio sometime last year (last year is a Complete Blur, for assorted reasons), and had a long, congenial chat about a whole lot of things, among me, my husband, Matt and Maril. We talked about Claire's parents (my POV being that they're dead , but if Matt wanted to do a storyline about them in the Prequel, it was OK with me (he did, and it worked brilliantly—the actors are wonderful!)).
In the course of this long and very far-ranging conversation, we discussed things I was doing in Book Ten and what other projects I might have in mind, no matter how far out (I do, of course, have the Prequel Book (1) in my TBD pile--and no, it won't have Claire's parents in it; they're dead. Repeat after me: “The books are the books and the show is the show”).
Master Raymond was mentioned (I don't know by whom), and I said that a) I do have pieces of the book _about_ Master Raymond, but that's about #4 in my stack--meaning I write down stuff when it comes to me, but b) I'm not actually _working_ in a regular way on that novel.
As this was a conversation, rather than a Meeting, I then mentioned casually that I had at one time considered doing a second graphic novel, and IF I HAD (WHICH I BLOODY DIDN’T AND I’M NOT GOING TO**), it might have included something about Master Raymond and what—if anything—he might have done following his visit to save Claire’s life at the hospital.
OK. This is the way I work; I don’t sit down and type out a detailed timeline of things I might write over the next ten years. I don’t work with an outline, and I don’t write in a straight line. I get ideas, and some of them come with words, and if they do, I write them down. If they don’t, but seem interesting in some way, I just remember them—sometimes (as I work on other things, usually), one of those will drift back into my mind, and this time I see a possibility, or a faint relationship with something else.
** I’m not going to write a second graphic novel because a) I have way too many other things that I’d rather write first, and b) the first one was OK, and fun to do, but not very popular—owing in part to ignorance on the part of the audience as to what a graphic novel _was_ (this was a number of years ago, and my readership is largely a lot older than the normal readers of graphic novels). We had a lot of people who bought it and were Displeased to find that it was “a comic book!!” (This, in spite of my insisting that the Amazon listing include page shots…) Even more of them were Very Displeased that the artist had somehow failed to read their minds and draw their perceived version of Jamie or Claire. However…
One of the things I liked about writing a graphic novel was that it gave me the opportunity to tell parts of the story that the book didn’t. See, one of the benefits of a visual medium (being comic books, TV or video games) is that you can have multiple points-of-view operating at once. You can’t (normally) do that in regular text. (You can do it sequentially, of course, but that’s not the same effect.)
So THE EXILE isn’t told solely from Claire’s point of view; it includes POV’s from Jamie, Murtagh, Dougal, Geillis, etc. Consequently, there are bits of the story that aren’t in OUTLANDER at all, or that explore what Someone Other Than Claire was doing at the time.
That was interesting, and that’s what caused me to think about Master Raymond. As noted above, I do intend to write a book ABOUT HIM (if you follow my page, you will have seen a few bits of it (my little meditation on Halloween—“In the cold time, when the spiders die…Sometimes I think I see it, too.”—is from that book. There’s a little more, below…
Anyway, as I said, that book isn’t on top of my mental pile, but ideas still show up, and I tuck them away in some mental crevice, from which they peek out now and then, like curious moray eels… And one of those was my thought as to whether Master Raymond might have intervened in some way that we didn’t see, after the nuns ejected him. I have not written a word about this, and quite possibly never will.
OK. You aren’t going to see any of those thoughts in Book Ten, because they don’t belong there. If you ever _do_ see them (and they aren’t even developed thoughts; just what I call kernels), they’ll be in Master Raymond’s own story (should I live that long…).
But the bottom line here is that No, Faith isn’t/wasn’t alive in the Outlander novels, she’s not going to be, and neither Claire nor Jamie will ever think so. William will not ever have Moral Qualms over having unknowingly had s*x with his half-niece (though it’s interesting to see how many people think that possibility is Just Horrifying…I mean, really; what’s more wrong about having s*x with a pr******te who’s related to you than one who isn’t, as long as no children result?).
Repeat after me: The books are the books, and the show is the show…
OK, the Master Raymond excerpt is on another computer, so I’m going to stop here; will put that up later. But I hope this settles at least some of the dust surrounding that gentleman…
