The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide (4 page)

But I just can’t change what happens, because that’s the way it is. That’s the story: Who the people are dictates what happens to them. I mean, there are outside forces that can come in, but how the characters respond to them eventually determines where they’re going to be. Once you know who they are, there’s no way to change what their future is—it just is what it is.

And so my reaction, when the criticism is really bad and really hard, is:
I wish I would have kept this in my computer. I should have just held on to this work and have it be mine alone.
Because sometimes I wonder:
Is it worth it to share it?
But then you feel like you’re not doing your characters a service with that—they deserve to live more fully, in someone else’s mind.

Yes, I know I sound crazy! [Laughs]

SH:
No. I totally, totally understand that. I remember hearing writers talk about how their characters are almost alive, and almost have a will of their own. And I thought they were kinda full of crap [SM laughs] but there is something to it. I think that it’s a balance, though. There’s the idea of these characters that are alive in my mind, and then there’s me, the author. And I have some power to control the story, and to try and make it a strong story—but, then, the characters also have some power to say no.

SM:
Yeah.

SH:
For me, writing is finding a balance between that sort of transcendental story and my own power of writing—not letting myself overwrite them too much, and not letting them overrun me.

SM:
Yeah. See, I find that difficult—because, to me, you create a character, and you define them, and you make them who they are. And you get them into a shape where they are final. Their story isn’t, but they are who they are—and they
do feel very real. You can’t change who they are to make the story go easier.

So sometimes things happen in the story because my character, being who he is, can’t do anything different. I’ve written him so tightly into who he is that I cannot change his course of action now, without feeling like:
Well, that’s not in character—that’s not what he would do. There’s only one course now.
And sometimes it’s hard, when the course goes a way that’s difficult to write.

SH:
So how much did you know about Jacob and his future when you were writing
Twilight
?

SM:
Jacob was an afterthought. He wasn’t supposed to exist in the original story. When I wrote the second half of
Twilight
first, there was no Jacob character. He started to exist about the point where I kind of hit a bit of a wall: I could not make Edward say the words
I’m a vampire.
There was no way that was ever coming out of his mouth—he couldn’t do it. And that goes back to what we were talking about with characters. You know, he had been keeping the truth about himself secret for so long, and it was something he was so… unhappy about, and devastated about. He would never have been able to tell her.

And so I thought:
How is Bella ever going to figure this out?
But I had picked Forks already as the story’s location, and so then I thought:
You know, these people have been around for a while, and they’ve been in this area before. Have they left tracks—footprints—somewhere, that she can discover an older story to give her insight?

That’s when I discovered that there was a little reservation
of Quileute Indians on the coastline. I was interested in them before I even knew I was going to work them into the story. I thought:
Oh, that’s interesting. There’s a real dense and different kind of history there.
I’ve always kind of been fascinated with Native American history, and this was a story I’d never heard before.

This is a very small tribe, and it’s really not very well known, and their language is different from anyone else’s. And they have these great legends—even one that’s similar to the Noah’s Ark story; the Quileutes tied their canoes to the tops of the tallest trees so they weren’t swept away by the big flood—that I thought were really interesting.

And they have the wolf legend. The story goes that they descended from wolves—a magician changed the first Quileute from a wolf into a man, that’s how they began—and when I was reading the legend I thought:
You know, that’s kind of funny.
Because I know werewolf people and vampires don’t get along at all. And how funny is it that there’s that story, right here next to where I set my vampire story.

SH:
That’s so cool, that kind of serendipity that happens in storytelling.

SM:
It felt like,
Now
it’s on! Now I know how it has to be! What kismet to happen. And so Jacob was born—as a device, really—to tell Bella what she needed to know. And, yet, as soon as I gave him life, and gave him a chance to open his mouth, I just found him so endearing. He took on this personality that was just so funny and easy. And you love the characters you don’t have to work for.

And Jacob was not an ounce of work. He just came to life and was exactly what I needed him to be, and I just enjoyed him as a person. But his appearance in chapter 6 was really it—that was all he was in the story. And then my agent loved this Jacob, and she’s never gotten over that. She was one hundred percent Team Jacob all the time.

SH:
[Laughs] And, you know, I am, too. I love Jacob.

SM:
Oh, I love Jacob, too. So when my agent said: “I want some more of him,” I thought:
You know, I would love to do that. But I don’t want to mess with this too much.
I wanted to have my editor’s input before I started making any major changes. And my editor felt the same way: “You know, I like this. Are you going somewhere with this wolf story?”

So when I started the sequel, I knew there were going to be werewolves in it. Because it just seemed like all these stories that are pure fantasy, that are myths, are coming true for Bella. And then there’s Jacob. Here’s this world that he just thinks is a silly superstition. Then I thought:
What if all of it were real? What if everything that he just takes for granted is absolutely, one hundred percent based in fact?
What a world it would be if we knew that all these little legends around us are absolutely real! I can’t even imagine being able to wrap my mind around that.

And so I knew that the sequel I had already started on would be about finding out that they were werewolves. And it wasn’t
New Moon
—it was much closer to
Breaking Dawn
. Because the story had originally skipped beyond high school fairly quickly. But my editor said: “Well, I’d like to keep the story in high school, because we are marketing the first book this way. And I just feel like there’s so much that must have happened that we miss if we just skip to Bella being a grown-up.” And I said: “Well, you know, I could always make my characters talk more—that’s not a problem. Let’s go back and have this kind of stuff happen earlier.” So I had a chance to develop it.

By the time I got to
Breaking Dawn
the characters were so fleshed out—and their allegiances were so strong to whatever they hated or loved—that it made the story just a whole lot richer when I came to it the second time, because there was so much more backstory to it.

SH:
I have to go back to the point that Jacob exists because Edward couldn’t say, “I am a vampire.” So Edward is what created the necessity for Jacob. Just as Edward’s existence, and nearness as a vampire, made Jacob into a werewolf. I just think it’s interesting that those two characters, who are sometimes friends and sometimes…

SM:
Not.

SH:
… enemies, can’t seem to live without each other. They completely are born from each other.

SM:
Jacob was born from Edward… also because of—I guess you have to say it was a flaw—Edward’s inability to be honest about this essential fact of himself. Although it was an understandable flaw—it was something that he was supposed to keep secret. You know, it wasn’t something that you just say in everyday passing conversation: “By the way [laughs], I’m a vampire.” It’s just not a normal thing.

Jacob’s character also became an answer to the deficiencies in Edward—because Edward’s not perfect. There were things about him that didn’t make him the most perfect boyfriend in the whole world. I mean, some things about him make him
an amazing boyfriend, but other things were lacking—and Jacob sort of was the alternative. Here you have Edward, someone who overthinks everything—whose every emotion is overwrought—and just tortures himself. And there’s so much angst, because he has never come to terms with what he is.

Then here you have Jacob, someone who never gives anything a passing thought and just is happy-go-lucky: If something’s wrong, well, okay—let’s just get over it and move on. Here’s someone who’s able to take things in stride a little bit more, who doesn’t overthink everything. Someone who’s a little rash. He does seem foolish sometimes, just because he doesn’t pause to think before he leaps, you know?

That was sort of the opposite of Edward’s character in a lot of ways. It gave a balance to the story and a choice for Bella, because I think she needed that. There was an option for her to choose a different life, with someone that she could have loved—or someone who she does love. I always felt like that was really necessary to the story. Because when I write, I try to make the characters react to things the way I think real people would.

I think that, in reality, it’s never one boy—there’s never this moment when you know. There’s a choice there, and sometimes it’s hard. Romance and relationships are a tangle, and this messy thing—you never know what to expect, and people are so surprising.

SH:
So for you, was the storyline inevitable? Or were there points when you were writing where you thought the characters might have made one choice or another?

SM:
It’s a funny thing—because it was inevitable. From the time I started the first sequel, I always knew what was going to happen. With
Twilight
I had no idea what was going to happen—it just sort of happened. But after I knew where it was going, I knew Edward and Bella were going out
together. As you start to write stories you get twist-offs of things—there are three or four or five different ways it could have gone, and none of them were the right way. I knew what the real way was.

But I do know what would have happened if Edward hadn’t come back. You know, I know that whole story—how it went down, and what their future was. I know what would have happened if this character had changed—when he did one little thing here, or that. There are always a million different stories—you just know which one it is that you’re going to write. But that doesn’t make the others not exist.

SH:
And I think that comes through in the writing—that you are aware of these alternate realities. I think the reader becomes aware of these other realities, too. And that’s nice, because then it’s not predictable. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, because you can see there are other ways it can go.

SM:
I think that’s why the alternate stories develop—because you have to make it suspenseful; there has to be conflict—and there has to be, hopefully, some mystery about where it’s going to go. If it’s so clear that something specific is
obviously
going to happen, well, nobody wants to read that. So where’s the suspense going to come from? It comes when you start to realize: Well, this other thing
could
have happened. Even though
you
know where you’re going with it.