Read Online The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide by Stephenie Meyer - Free Book Online Page B

brilliant.
    SM: Yeah, that might be nice.
I think it’s really good for my kids to see that I have my own life outside of them—that I’m a real person.
     
    SH: So, we’re both mothers. And I think that mothers are famously guilt-ridden creatures. [SM laughs] I mean, we never succeed—we’re always failing at something. So have you had to deal with guilt of, you know, taking the time—allowing yourself to take the time to be a writer, and to pursue this?
    SM: Occasionally. It doesn’t bother me that often. I think it’s because my kids are really, really great. They’re good and they’re happy. I’ve seen kids who are treated like the center of the universe, and I don’t think that’s entirely healthy. I think it’s really good for my kids to see that I have my own life outside of them—that I’m a real person. I think that’s going to help them when they grow up and have children—to realize that they’re still who they are.
    And then I am pretty careful about
when
I write. Now it’s mostly when they’re in school. When they were little, though, I never shut myself away in an office—I’d always written in the middle of their madness—so I’d be there, and I could get whatever they needed. They know I’m listening. And they’re also pretty good about saying: “Okay, Mommy’s writing right now. Unless I’m bleeding, I’m not going to bug her.”
    And I also write at night. When they come home from school, we do homework and I hear about their day and I make them snacks. The nice thing about writing is, you can do it on your own schedule. But you do lose sleep. You know, I feel like I haven’t slept eight hours in ten years.
If you start getting a little bit of dialogue in your head, you’re doomed—you’ll never get to sleep.
     
    SH: It’s like having a newborn, writing a book, isn’t it?
    SM: It is. Well, because you lie there in bed—and, oh, heaven help you if you start thinking about plotline. If you start getting a little bit of dialogue in your head, you’re doomed—you’ll never get to sleep.
    SH: It is so true. I can sleep pretty well at the beginning of the night. If, for whatever reason, I wake up—or my son comes in and wakes me up anytime between the hours of two and five—and if my mind, for one second, goes back to the book I’m writing right now, I’m done for the rest of the night. I can’t go back to sleep, because my mind starts working over and over it. I’ve had to train my brain to do that, on purpose, so that I’m always writing, even when I’m not.
    SM: You at least put things in the back of your head, so that you’re solving the problems.
    SH: Exactly—so when I sit down to write it’s more productive, because I’ve been working over it in my brain. But, like you say, when you do that in the middle of the night, you’re doomed.
    SM: Well, one of my problems right now is that I have not committed to a project at this point in time, and I’m waiting to be done with the publicity. And that’s never
really
going to happen, so I need to just commit to one. I have about fourteen different books, and every night it’s a new one. And I’m coming up with solutions for this one point that really bothered me in one story. I thought maybe I couldn’t write it because of this one point. But then I’ll wake up at four o’clock in the morning with a perfect solution, and then I can’t go back to sleep.
    SH: I have found if I just write it down, then my mind can stop working over it.
    SM: Exactly.

On Reading and Writing for Young Adults

     
    SH: So far, all of your stories have something of the fantastic in them. You don’t read only fantasy, though.
    SM: Oh, I love mainstream fiction, and there are a lot of books that I really love that are without absolutely any fantasy elements. But, for me, the fantasy ones are for writing. There’s an extra amount of happiness, that extra oomph, in getting to make your own world at the same time that you’re