New Moon by Stephenie Meyer

Obsession, Part II
(see Part I here)

Naturally, I have spent a lot of time at Stephenie Meyer’s website. Surfing author websites is another thing I never used to do, but given my obsession with the books and the actual amount of great content on her site, it’s easy to waste hours at a time there. I especially love how she so openly and generously shares her outtakes and brainstorms—sections of her manuscript that didn’t make the editorial cut or material she intended to write just for fun.

Stephenie Meyer also writes about herself and her writing process. Again, this is not something I usually seek out, but I am continually charmed and fascinated by all her anecdotes. I already love her writing voice, and outside of Twilight, she is more casual, self-deprecating, and funny.

Writing about the genesis of Twilight, she says that a scene from what became the middle of the book came to her fully formed in a dream one night. She felt compelled to write it down, and, over the next three months, wrote the rest of the story. The part that fascinates me is this: “All this time, Bella and Edward were, quite literally, voices in my head. They simply wouldn't shut up.”

I have often heard authors talk about their characters as if they were completely out of the writer’s control. I love this idea, of a character with a life, a history, and a personality totally separate from the author’s. Many times, writers will say that they were completely surprised to find that a character of theirs was really such-and-such, or that “it turned out” a character had this or that background. I love this idea of the fictional having so much control over their creators.

Stephenie Meyer’s story of how New Moon came about is filled with this sort of thing.

[A]s I began to sketch out New Moon, I went back to Bella's senior year of high school and asked my little cast of characters, ‘What happened?’ I swiftly regretted asking them for the story. Because they gave me a story I wasn't expecting. More specifically, Edward told me something I didn't want to hear.

I should probably mention here that I am not crazy (that I know of), it's just that I am a character writer. I write my stories because of my characters; they are the motivation and the reward. The difficulty with strong, defined characters, though, is that you can't make them do something that is out of character. They have to be who they are and, as a writer, they're often out of your control.

As I started plotting New Moon (untitled at that point), it became clear that Edward was Edward, and he would have to behave as only Edward would.

See? She even admits that what the characters do is out of her control. Sometimes I think that was separates the great storytellers from the rest of us. I, at least, may be too much of a control freak to write fiction. I mean, this would never happen to me:

Something happened then that I didn't expect. Jacob was my first experience with a character taking over—a minor character developing such roundness and life that I couldn't keep him locked inside a tiny role. (Since Jacob, this has reoccurred with several other meant-to-be-minor characters. I really love it when this happens, though it often destroys my outlines.)

A character taking over! Wrestling the plot from the author and taking it in a whole new direction without the author’s consent! It sounds like the stuff of fiction, right out of Inkheart or something, but that’s how it works. I bet this is how it works with most fiction writers, too. And while I have no experience at all with this, I love thinking that in any creative endeavor, there are things that are simply out of our control—that’s what makes it art.

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer