Stephenie Meyer's Drive To Write: "I Was Really Burned Out"

Stephenie Meyer - the genius behind the Twilight phenomenon - walked the red carpet at the Los Angeles premiere of New Moon on Monday night (November 16).

Stephenie made a rare appearance on Oprah last week and said the demands of motherhood - and the need for an escape - motivated her to write Twilight.

I was really burned out. I really had gotten into that zombie mom way of doing things where I wasn’t Stephenie anymore,” said the mom of three young boys: Gabe, Seth, and Eli. “[Writing Twilight] was a release. That was the dam bursting. I’d been bottling up who I was for so long, I needed an expression.”

Though she'd been married for 15 years, Stephenie didn't tell her husband at first about her new passion. "My husband though I'd gone crazy. I'd barely spoken to him because I had all these things going on in my head, and I wasn't telling him about this weird vampire obsession because I knew he'd freak out and think I'd lost my mind," she said.

Stephenie said that the idea for the series of books came to her in a dream. “It was two people in kind of a little circular meadow with really bright sunlight, and one of them was a beautiful, sparkly boy and one was just a girl who was human and normal, and they were having this conversation. The boy was a vampire, which is so bizarre that I’d be dreaming about vampires, and he was trying to explain to her how much he cared about her and yet at the same time how much he wanted to kill her,” Stephenie said. “It really captured my imagination.”

And what a success story indeed! Four years after the release of Twilight, 70 million copies have been sold worldwide and the books have spent 143 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Not to mention that the first movie in The Twilight Saga grossed $380 million at the box office.

Did you read the books? Are you going to see New Moon this weekend?