The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide

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.

On The Writing Process

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.

And I cannot read a page of anything I‘ve written without making five changes — that‘s my average.

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.

That was one of my favorite parts — reading it.

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.