Stephenie Meyer - New Moon

SH: The sunlight on Edwards skin?

SM: Yeah. There was this beautiful image, this boy, just glittering with light and talking to this normal girl. And the dream really was about him. She was also listening, as I was, and he was the one telling the story. It was mostly about how much he wanted to kill herand, yet, how much he loved her.

In the dream I think Id gotten most of the way through whats chapter 13 now. The part where he recounts how he felt in each specific previous scene was obviously put in later, because I hadnt written those earlier scenes yet. But everything else in that scene was mostly what they were actually talking about in the dream. Even the analogy about food was something that I got in my dream.

I was so intrigued when I woke up. I just sat there and thought: So how does that end? Does he kill her? Because it was really close. You know how, in dreams, its not just what you hear, but you also kind of feel whats going on, and you see everything that the person in your head sees. So I knew how close it was. I mean, there was just a thin, thin line between what he was going to choose. And so I just wondered: How would they have made that work? What would be the next step for a couple like this?

I had recently started realizing that my memory was going, and that I could no longer remember whom I had said something to yesterday. My youngest was just passing one, and the next one was two, and I had an almost-five-year-old. So my brains were like oatmealthere was nothing left. And so I knew I was going to forget this story! That realization was something that really hurt me.

You know, when I was a kid, I always told myself stories, but I didnt write them down. I didnt have tomy memory was great then. So I could always go back and revisit the one about this, the one about that, and go over and refine it. But this one was going to get lost if I didnt do something about it. So after I got the kids breakfast done, I only had two hours before swim lessons. And, even though I should have been doing other things, I started writing it out.

It wasnt the dream so much as that day of writing that made me a writer.

It wasnt the dream so much as that day of writing that made me a writer. Because the dream was great, and it was a good story. But if Id had my memory [laughs] it would have stayed just a story in my head. And I would have figured out everything that happened, and told it to myself, but that would have been it.

But writing it down and making it real, and being able to go back and reread the sentences, was just a revelation to me. It was this amazing experience: Wow! This is what its like to write down stories. I was just hookedI didnt want to quit.

I used to paintwhen I was in high school, particularly. I won a few awardsI was okay with the watercolors. My mom still has some hanging up in her house. Slightly embarrassing, but theyre decent. I was not a great painter. It was not something I should have pursued as a career, by any stretch of the imagination. I could see a picture in my head, but I could not put it on the canvas the same way it was in my head. That was always a frustration. When I started writing I immediately had a breakthrough: I can make it real if I write it, and its exactly the way I see it in my head. I didnt know I was able to do that. So that was really the experience that made me a writer, and made me want to continue being one.

SH: So you started out writing out the meadow scene. Where did you go from there?

SM: I continued to the end, chronologicallywhich I dont always do anymore.

SH: So you didnt go back to the beginning because you wanted to know what was going to happen next.

SM: Yeah. I was just like any reader with a storyyou want to find out what happened. The backstory was for later. I wasnt really that worried about itI wanted to see where it was going to go.

So I kept writing. The last chapter just kept getting longer and longerand then I made epilogue after epilogue. There were so many things I wanted to explorelike why this was this way, and why this was that way, and how Bella first met Alice, and what their first impressions were. So I went back and did the beginning, and found it really exciting to be able to flesh it out and give reasons for everything that had happened later.

I had lettered all my chapters instead of numbering them. So I went back and did A, and I think that I had chapter 13 being E. Because I thought, maybe, five or six chapters of material would cover the beginning and then it was twelve, so I was surprised about that. [Laughs]

SH: You were surprised about how much had really happened beforehand?

SM: Yeah, it just kept going on. I was thinking: Wow, this is taking a long time. And thats where I finally ended, which was the last sentence in chapter 12. And I knew I had crossed the continent with the railroad, and this was the golden spike that was being driven. It was all linked together. And that was that moment of shock, when I thought: Its actually long enough to be considered a book-length thing of some kind.

SH: You really didnt even consider it like a book until then?