The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide Read Online Free

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 reservationof 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.
What a world it would be if we knew that all these little legends around us are absolutely real!
     
    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