Michelle Da Silva from Straight.com interviewed Stephenie Meyer during her screening and book signing tour with Jake and Max.
“It’s really about the ties you have to your community, to people you belong with, and the people that you love,” Meyer says. “Twilight is romantic love. From the very beginning it is about that all-encompassing first love, and sort of chasing that and pursuing that through the course of the novels.…Melanie is different in that she gets to be a more fully-formed human. It’s a more adult place where there are many things that pull at her than just one romantic love.”
For those of you who read the transcript or listened to the audio recording of it, then you know that this response is very similar to the one we received when asking our question about what she feels the larger message is behind ‘The Host’.
Stephenie talks about how she is writes ‘The Host’ books chronologically, rather than her style during the ‘Twilight’ series where she bounced around.
I’ve just been writing The Host novels chronologically, which actually drives me nuts,” she says. “With the Twilight novels, I did a lot of jumping around in the story, which I think is a little bit easier, so I need to try and break out of my cycle.”
She also talks about being a shy person and having to learn how to be more confident. I can definitely relate to that!
“When you’re writing, it’s a solitary thing. You have a lot of people in your head, which does provide quite a bit of company, but it’s different than having human interaction,” Meyer explains. “I’ve had to get a lot more confidence because I’m really quite a shy person at heart, so all of the time in front of cameras and talking to people is not my forte.
As you’ve probably already figured out, I am a writer, so hearing about her influences and writing process are the most poignant for me. There are a couple points Stephenie talked about with Straight.com: how she realized that she enjoyed writing and the idea I heard at the Q&A in DC about writing for yourself primarily.
“I had the idea for Twilight and I didn’t want to forget because it was just so enjoyable. It was actually the process of writing it down to not forget it that I discovered how enjoyable writing was,” Meyer says. “One day, I became a writer—at least in the hobby sense—because I was like, ‘This is so much fun!’”
“For me, what’s important is to write the story just for myself.…If I listened to what I was supposed to do, Twilight would not have been the same novel,” she says. “So I think you just tell the story to yourself until you’re really happy with it and then worry about all the nonsense.”
