The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide (10 page)

SH:
Have people changed toward you—family, friends, and acquaintances?

SM:
You know, because when I started writing I had a bunch of little babies, we’ve moved a couple times. And you lose track of people, anyway, so I haven’t held on to many of my friends from before I started writing, just because of location.

It’s the same way with my college roommates. We’re lucky if we get a phone call in once a year anymore. Then I’ve gotten enormously busy—I’ve changed—I don’t have as much time for social things. And I do think that I probably lost some friends just out of sheer neglect. Because I wasn’t going to neglect my kids.

SH:
Yeah.

SM:
And that summer with
Twilight
, I couldn’t do anything social. Why would I spend my time away from Forks when I could be there? I’m getting better at balancing it, and I have
some really great friends now, which is nice. I have a lot of extended family, too, and they’ve all been very cool and supportive. But because there are so many of them, we haven’t been able to spend a lot of time together. I have seventy-five first cousins on one side of my family, so it’s not like we can get together and party very often. Most of us have several kids. My dad had a stepmom with five kids; his dad had seven…. It’s just a really big family. [Laughs] A big warm family, and nobody’s been uncool about it. It’s all been very nice.

SH:
I think family is good…. They knew you as an obnoxious young person. [Laughs]

SM:
Very obnoxious. Yeah, I’m just Stephenie to them.

SH:
I don’t think any success I’ve had has gotten to my head, because I can’t really take it seriously, or absorb it, anyway. But if I ever got close, I think my family would be there to tear me back down. [SM laughs] Which is what family’s for.

SM:
Yeah, my husband’s really good at keeping me humble, you know? Because he’s such a math person. If something’s not quantifiable—if it doesn’t fit into an equation—it can’t possibly be important. And so, to him, books are like:
Oh, you know… isn’t that nice? Little fairy stories.
To me, books are the whole world, and it’s such a different viewpoint. So that helps. And then, like you, I don’t trust this to last for a second.

SH:
Yeah.

SM:
And when negative things happen with my career, I kind of expect them—more than I expect the positive. It’s almost
like:
Yes, this is what I thought was going to happen! I saw this one coming!
Because I am a pessimist—raised in a long tradition of fine pessimists [SH laughs] who have never expected anything good for decades. So I come by it naturally. [Laughs] So with every book that comes out, I think:
Oh, this is it. This is the last time anybody’s going to want to publish me.
And maybe it’s healthier than thinking:
I am the best! I’m so amazing!
I don’t think that’s a healthy way to be. It’d probably be nice to be somewhere in the middle, but… [Laughs]

SH:
In some ways, I would love to have that armor—the wonderful author’s ego—that I am right, and I know what I’m doing, and I’m brilliant.

SM:
Yeah, that might be nice.

SH:
So, we’re both mothers. And I think that mothers are famously guilt-ridden creatures. [SM laughs] I mean, we never succeed—we’re always failing at something. So have you had to deal with guilt of, you know, taking the time—allowing yourself to take the time to be a writer, and to pursue this?

SM:
Occasionally. It doesn’t bother me that often. I think it’s because my kids are really, really great. They’re good and they’re happy. I’ve seen kids who are treated like the center of the universe, and I don’t think that’s entirely healthy. I think it’s really good for my kids to see that I have my own life outside of them—that I’m a real person. I think that’s going to help them when they grow up and have children—to realize that they’re still who they are.

And then I am pretty careful about
when
I write. Now it’s mostly when they’re in school. When they were little, though, I never shut myself away in an office—I’d always written in the middle of their madness—so I’d be there, and I could get whatever they needed. They know I’m listening. And they’re also pretty good about saying: “Okay, Mommy’s writing right now. Unless I’m bleeding, I’m not going to bug her.”

And I also write at night. When they come home from school, we do homework and I hear about their day and I make them snacks. The nice thing about writing is, you can do it on your own schedule. But you do lose sleep. You know, I feel like I haven’t slept eight hours in ten years.

SH:
It’s like having a newborn, writing a book, isn’t it?

SM:
It is. Well, because you lie there in bed—and, oh, heaven help you if you start thinking about plotline. If you start getting a little bit of dialogue in your head, you’re doomed—you’ll never get to sleep.

SH:
It is so true. I can sleep pretty well at the beginning of the night. If, for whatever reason, I wake up—or my son comes in and wakes me up anytime between the hours of two and five—and if my mind, for one second, goes back to the book I’m writing right now, I’m done for the rest of the night. I can’t go back to sleep, because my mind starts working over and over it. I’ve had to train my brain to do that, on purpose, so that I’m always writing, even when I’m not.

SM:
You at least put things in the back of your head, so that you’re solving the problems.

SH:
Exactly—so when I sit down to write it’s more productive, because I’ve been working over it in my brain. But, like you say, when you do that in the middle of the night, you’re doomed.

SM:
Well, one of my problems right now is that I have not committed to a project at this point in time, and I’m waiting to be done with the publicity. And that’s never
really
going to happen, so I need to just commit to one. I have about fourteen different books, and every night it’s a new one. And I’m coming up with solutions for this one point that really bothered me in one story. I thought maybe I couldn’t write it because of this one point. But then I’ll wake up at four o’clock in the morning with a perfect solution, and then I can’t go back to sleep.

SH:
I have found if I just write it down, then my mind can stop working over it.

SM:
Exactly.

SH:
So far, all of your stories have something of the fantastic in them. You don’t read only fantasy, though.

SM:
Oh, I love mainstream fiction, and there are a lot of books that I really love that are without absolutely any fantasy elements. But, for me, the fantasy ones are for writing. There’s an extra amount of happiness, that extra oomph, in getting to make your own world at the same time that you’re writing it. I like that part…. Megalomania… You know, having control over an entire world? [Laughs]

SH:
That’s funny. Like we were talking about earlier, when you’re a writer there’s so much that can happen to ego, both
good and bad and everything in between. But young-adult authors tend to be pretty down-to-earth, don’t you think?

SM:
Well, I think writing YA keeps you humble. Because everybody says to you: “Oh… you write for children. Isn’t that nice?” It can be so patronizing sometimes, and, absolutely, it keeps you humble. It makes it so you can’t possibly become the “I am an author” author. There’s no way to do that when you write for children. [Laughs]

SH:
I think there’s also an element of:
It isn’t all just about me
. We’ve both written adult books. I think, when you’re in the adult market, it’s all about how many books you sell and what awards you get. But when you’re writing in the children’s market, it’s about the children, too. And you’re part of this team—with librarians and booksellers and parents and teachers—and you’re promoting literacy and some good stuff beyond just:
I’m writing a book, and now pay me for it
. So I think people tend to be more even-tempered and more balanced in the children’s world.

SM:
Because I didn’t set out to write for children, I would never have thought that my books would promote literacy. Someone would have to be a real reader to ever pick one of these up, just because they’ve run out of everything else. [Laughs]

And one of the little “icing things” of this career is to have these kids come up to tell me that this is the first book they’ve ever read for pleasure, and that they’ve moved on. Now they’ve read this other one, and they’ve read that one, and now they’re so excited about some other book
they’ve found. And to have written the first book that got them excited to be a reader—oh, that’s an amazing gift.

SH:
It is. The best compliment that I ever get is not that my books are their favorite, but that mine was the first that made them fall in love with reading.

SM:
And now they’ve gone on. You know, I had a great childhood, and one thing that made my childhood so special was that because I loved to read, I lived a thousand adventures—and I was a thousand heroines, and I fell in love a thousand times. And now, to open up those worlds for somebody else… I know how great it is, and I wish I could give everybody that gift—to find the book that does it for you.

I did an interview for
The Host
once, and the camera guy who was setting everything up said: “So this book is about aliens?” I said: “Yeah, kind of.” And he said, “Well, you know, I think I’ve read three books in my life. I hate reading, ever since school—it was such a torture.” And I just thought:
How sad! There’s some book out there that’s perfectly tailored for him, and he doesn’t know.

SH:
Right.

SM:
But he’s not going to pick it up, because he had a bad experience. I really feel like one of the important things you can do for kids in school is not just give them the classics that teach them about excellent form and really great writing style, but also throw in a couple of fun things that teach them that reading can be this amazing adventure. Let them love some story, so at least they know not all books are “hard” or “difficult,” but that they can just be fun.

SH:
I agree so passionately about that. And I think some of the key is to have a lot of variety. Because not every genre, or every storytelling style, is going to be right for everyone.

SM:
Some people are going to latch on to Shakespeare, and they’re going to be like: [gasps] “The insights!” And then some people are going to need an action story with car chases and gunfights—they’re going to need that to get them started.

SH:
Every student should have a chance to find at least one book they fall in love with. Then they’ll be more likely to go on and keep reading for life.

SM:
Exactly. When I was in school I had some really great teachers. And lucky for me, I had already discovered books that I really liked. The classics came easily to me—I read them early, and so it was familiar ground:
Oh, good. I’m doing Jane Austen again. Whoo!
But a lot of kids come into it and they’re hit in the face with a great big difficult-to-understand text—if they don’t have the background to appreciate the experience, it just sours them on the whole thing. And it’s sad.