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Q. Stephanie Meyer has said that her characters were real and that they decided where the plot would go. Is it like that for you?
A. So far as I can tell, if you say that, you’re saying one of two things:
1. I have this unconscious mind to which I have no access that can write books, and I just have to shut off my conscious mind and let my unconscious mind work.
or
2. A supernatural force came to me and whispered the words into my ear and I wrote them down.
Saying the second thing seems really presumptuous to me (like, saying that God wrote your book is a very, very bold thing to say). The first seems more plausible to me—I know that for many people the writing experience does not feel like it involves effort or consciousness—but for me that is not the case. I wrote the book. I was conscious of the fact that I was writing a book while I was writing it. I was conscious of the fact that I was using words to try to tell a story that would find life in your mind.
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and
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Q. Where do you get your ideas?
A. I don’t really know. If I had a better understanding of where my ideas came from, I would go there and acquire more ideas. I don’t tend to have big ideas, like, “A SCHOOL FOR WIZARDS!” or “VAMPIRES IN SUBURBIA!” My stories tend to start out with people: a child prodigy who hits the wall of his intellectual talents. A religious but not fundamentalist Muslim in the South. A young woman kept alive but uncured by a novel cancer treatment. These characters mix with questions that interest and/or haunt me: Why are we so interested in leaving a legacy? Can we construct meaning in a world that is so profoundly apathetic toward us? Is it possible to have a full life without having a long life? That’s where my books start, really. They begin at the intersection between people I’m imagining and questions that bug me.
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Basically, John Green hates Twilight just as much as the rest of us :)
