Edward, and the start of the entire "Twilight" universe, came to Meyer in a dream. She can even remember the day it happened.
"I can say with certainty that it all started on June 2, 2003," the author says on her website. "I woke up ... from a very vivid dream. In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods."
That dream fascinated her in a way none ever had. "Never before, never since," she remarked in an "Oprah" segment from 2009. "It was really a one-of-a-kind thing. I'm just glad I didn't waste it."
Meyer wrote down everything she could remember, and it became the thirteenth chapter, "Confessions," from the original "Twilight." She continued on from there, writing the book's conclusion before she wrote the beginning.
"From that point on, not one day passed that I did not write something," Meyer recalls in the same website entry. "On bad days, I would only type out a page or two; on good days, I would finish a chapter and then some." As a stay-at-home mother, she was busy with her kids during the day, causing her to write more at night so she wouldn't be interrupted.
For her lead vampire's name, Meyer turned to the classics. "I decided to use a name that had once been considered romantic, but had fallen out of popularity for decades," she says on her website. "Charlotte Bronte's Mr. Rochester and Jane Austen's Mr. Ferrars were the characters that led me to the name Edward."
