On the Road With Stephanie Meyer

August 15, 2008 6:20 PM

Stephenie Meyer says she had a dream several years ago about a teenage girl sitting in a meadow talking to a vampire.

  "I was sort of observing a very normal girl and a beautiful, sparkling vampire and overhearing their conversation and it was so intriguing to me that I wanted to write it down for me so I wouldn't forget it," Meyer said during an interview for "Nightline" shortly before a book signing event in Chicago.

  She wrote it down, and wrote some more. The mother of young children, she wrote all night and took care of children during the day. She wrote until the end result was "Twilight," a best seller about a teenage girl named Bella Swan who falls in love with the other-worldly handsome vampire Edward Cullen, who has born more than a hundred years before her.

Now, less than three years after the publication of Twilight, Meyer has published more than three thousand pages of fiction and has fifteen million books in print in the U.S. Her loyal readership of teenage girls has made her a publishing phenomenon often compared to J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books.

On the final night of her recent book tour, Meyer packed a Seattle auditorium with 2,200 fans.
"I do think there is that hole in literature right now for a girl who isn't the most popular girl in school or who has a magical power," Meyer said. "There isn't a lot of fiction with just a normal girl where you could say 'I could be her with without a lot of changes. I could step into this novel.'"

  Now with the Aug. 2 publication of "Breaking Dawn", Meyer wraps up the four-volume saga of teenage love that lasts forever.  Meyer's books take license with reality and with the tradition of vampires. Edward Cullen comes from a family of vampires that has decided it's unethical to kill and drink the blood of humans. And Edward is a boy about which a girl can only dream; good looking, considerate, always thinking about what is best for the girl he loves. He wants to devour Bella with love, and devour her at the same time.

  Meyer said, "That's what sort of gives it its tension. It's that extra aspect. It's not just life or death because your heart could be broken. It's life or death because you could die at any moment and that makes it pretty exciting for me as a writer."

  It is moral fiction with occasional lessons in life, although Meyer says that is not what she set out to write. She has written the kinds of books she would like to read. Raised in the Mormon faith in Arizona, she says she wrote the stories for herself.

"I'm a moral person so I do tend to see the world in black and white," she said. "Not big black and big white, you know little tiny checkers of it. There's always a right and a wrong in the situation. Because I'm that way I think that comes through in a lot of my characters."

Given that vampires live forever, you'd think Meyer would go on cashing in with Edward and Bella. "I could but you know I've never written stories for anybody else. And I couldn't do it now. I couldn't decide well gosh this is making a lot of money I'll throw in a another chapter. That really isn't who I am."

-Brian Rooney