The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide (3 page)

SM:
I think there was this subconscious thing going on that was protecting me from thinking of the story in a way that would keep me from being able to finish it.

SH:
Right. But, of course, you were a reader. You’ve been an avid reader for your whole life.

SM:
That was always my favorite thing, until I found writing. My kids and my husband used to tease me, because my hand would kind of naturally form this sort of bookholder [SH laughs], this claw for holding books. Because I had the baby in one arm and the book in the other—with the bottle tucked under my chin and the phone on my shoulder. [Laughs] You know, the Octopus Mom. But I always had a book.

I always needed that extra fantasy world. I had to have another world I could be in at the same time. And so, with
writing, I just found a way to have another world, and then to be able to be a lot more a part of it than as a reader.

SH:
I think it’s part of multitasking. I wonder if most writers—I know moms have to be this way, but most writers, too—have to have two things going on at once just to stay entertained.

SM:
Exactly. [Laughs]

SH:
It’s not that I’m unsatisfied, because I love my life. I’m a mom, too, of small kids—and I love my husband—but I also need something else beyond that. I need another story to take me away.

SM:
You know, it’s funny. As I’ve become a writer, I started looking at other writers and how they do things, and everybody’s very different. I read
Atonement
recently, and I was interested in the way Ian McEwan writes about being a writer through the character’s standpoint…. She’s always seeing another story. She’s doing one thing—but, then, in her head, it becomes something else, and it turns into another story.

It’s kind of like what you were saying about writers needing that extra reality to escape to. I think that writers maybe do have just that need for more than one reality. [Laughs]

SH:
You know, we’re not really sure if it’s insanity or it’s a superpower.

SM:
But it’s an insanity that doesn’t hurt anybody.

SH:
Right. It’s kind of friendly, cozy, fuzzy insanity.

SH:
I think you must write much better first drafts than I do.

SM:
I doubt that.

SH:
Really? Are they pretty bad?

SM:
I think so. I have to go over them again and again, because I don’t always flesh it out enough. I write it through so quickly that I have to go back and add things. I tend to use the same words a lot, and I have to consciously go back and take out things like that. And I don’t always get them. My first drafts are scary.

SH:
How do you go about rewriting? With
Twilight
, did you send it off immediately, or did you go back and start revising it?

SM:
I probably read it, I don’t know, fifty to a hundred times before I sent it anywhere. And I cannot read a page of anything I’ve written without making five changes—that’s my average. So even now that
Twilight
is “finished”—quote-unquote—oh, I’d love to revise it. I could do such a better job now. And I have a hard time rereading it. Because if I read it on the computer, I want to go in and change things—and it drives me crazy that I can’t.

SH:
Yeah. I try not to read anything that I’ve already published.

SM:
If I read it in the book form, I can usually relax and kind of enjoy it. I like to experience the stories again, because I see it like I did the first time I saw it. But sometimes it’s hard not to be like, “Oh, I hate that now. Why did I do it that way?” [Laughs]

SH:
That would be writers’ hell: You’re continually faced with a manuscript that you wrote years ago and not allowed to change it.

SM:
[Laughs] Well, then, that’s every writer’s reality, right? [Laughs]

SH:
I don’t know if you feel this way, but once a book is written and out of my hands and out there, I no longer feel like I wrote it. I don’t feel like I can even claim the story anymore. I feel like now it belongs out there, with the readers.

SM:
I feel that way about the hardbound copy on the shelf. There is a disassociation there. If I look at it on a shelf, and it seems very distant and cold and important, I don’t feel like it’s something that belongs to me. When I read it, it does.

SH:
I guess I haven’t reread my books. I listen to the audiobooks, actually—one time for each book—and I have enjoyed that. The people who did my audiobooks are a full cast, so it’s like this play, almost.

SM:
Oh, that’s so cool.

SH:
They say things differently than I would have, but instead of being wigged out by it, I actually like it. Because it’s as though I’m hearing a new story, and I’m hearing it for the first time.

SM:
See, I can’t ignore my mistakes as much when I hear it on audio. I have tried to listen to my books on audio, and
I cannot do it. Because I hear the awkwardness in a phrase when it’s spoken aloud, and I just think:
Oh, gosh! I shouldn’t have phrased it that way.
And there’ll be other things where I hear the mistakes a lot louder than when I read through it and kind of skip over them with my eyes.

SH:
Now, by the time you finished
Twilight
, you thought,
This is a book
—and then you started to revise. Did you revise just to, like you said, relive the story? Or did you have a purpose?

SM:
Well, while I was writing I would revise while I was going. I’d start and go back and read what I’d written up to that point before I started. And some days I’d spend the whole day just making changes and adding things to what I’d written. That was one of my favorite parts—reading it. That surprised me, you know…. But then it’s the book that’s perfect for you, because you wrote it for yourself, and so it’s everything that you want it to be.

And when I put the “golden spike” into it, I looked at it and felt… kind of shocked that I’d finished it. And then I thought maybe there was a reason I’d done all this, that I was supposed to go forward with this. Maybe there was some greater purpose, and I was supposed to do something with it. Because it was such an odd thing for me, to write a book over the summer; it was so odd for me to feel so compelled about it.

The one person who knew what I was doing was my big sister Emily. But my sister’s so:
Everything’s wonderful! Everything’s perfect! You shouldn’t change a single word!
[SH laughs] She’s so supportive; I knew that it was not a big risk to let her see it. So it was the combination of thinking,
I finished this!
and Emily saying, “Well, you have to try and publish it. You have to do it.” I don’t know how many times we talked when she’d say, “Stephenie, have you sent anything out yet?”

So then I revised with a purpose. And I revised with a
sense of total embarrassment:
Oh my gosh. If anyone ever sees this I’ll be so humiliated. I can’t do it.
And then Emily would call again, and again I’d feel this sense like:
Maybe I’m supposed to.
Then I started doing all the research, you know… like looking for an agent. I didn’t know that writers had agents. I thought only athletes and movie stars did that.

So that was intimidating and off-putting:
I need an agent? This sounds complicated.
Then I had to find out how to write literary queries. And summing up my story in ten sentences was the most painful thing for me.

SH:
Horrible.

SM:
It does not work well. [Laughs] And it was also pretty painful having to put out this letter that says: “Hi, this is who I am; this is what I’ve written; this is what it’s about. I have absolutely no experience, or any reason why I think that you should actually pick this up, because who am I? Thank you very much, Stephenie Meyer.” [Laughs] That was hard.

And sending them out—I don’t want to remember that often. Because you know how you kind of blank out things that are unpleasant—like childbirth and stuff? It was such a hard thing to do. Back in the neighborhood where I lived at the time, you couldn’t put mail in your mailbox—kids stole it—so you had to drive out and go put it in a real mailbox. And to this day I can’t even go by that corner without reliving the nauseating terror that was in my stomach when I mailed those queries.

SH:
Wow.

SM:
See, I didn’t take creative-writing classes like you. I didn’t take the classes because I knew someone was going to read what I would write. I didn’t worry about the writing part—it was letting someone else read it. My whole life that was a huge terror of mine: having someone know what goes on inside my head.

SH:
So how have you? Because, obviously, millions of people now have read what you wrote. Is it still terrifying for you, every time you put a book out?

SM:
Yeah… and with good reason. Because the world has changed—and the way books are received is different now. People are very vocal. And I do not have a lot of calluses on my creative soul—every blow feels like the first one. I have not learned how to take that lightly or let it roll off of me. I know it’s something I need to learn before I go mad—but it’s not something that I’ve perfected. And so it’s hard, even when you know it’s coming. You don’t know where it’s coming from—a lot of them are sucker punches.

With every book, I always see the part that I think people are going to get mad about, or the part that’s going to get mocked. With
Twilight
, I thought:
Oh gosh. People are just going to rip me apart for this—if anybody picks it up. Which they’re not going to, because they’re going to read the back and say: A book about vampires? Oh, come on—it’s been so done.
So I knew it was coming.

But there were always some things I wasn’t expecting that people wouldn’t like. I mean, with everything you put out, you just have to know: There are
going to be people who really like it, and that’s going to feel really good. But there are going to be people who really dislike things that are very personal to me, and I’m just going to have to take it.

SH:
But it’s so terrifying. I don’t know how you even have the courage to do it every time. The book of mine that I thought was going to be my simplest, happiest book, just a sweet little fun book that people would enjoy—that was the one that got slammed the hardest. Like you said, it was things I never could have anticipated that people didn’t like.

As I look back on it, I think if I had a chance, I would take those parts out, or change those things that people hated. But I didn’t know at the time. And so now, as I’m writing another book—I know there are things that people are going to hate. But I don’t know what they are. [SM laughs] If I only knew what they were, I would be sorely tempted to change them to try and please everyone! I do the very best I can, but you can never anticipate what it is that people are going to react to.

SM:
See, I have a very different reaction to that, because I
can’t
change it—it is the way it is. I mean, there are things I can do in editing—and I can polish the writing. I know I can always do better with that. And I know that, even in the final form, if I could have another three months to work on it, I would never stop polishing, because I can always make every word more important.