Q: Bree only appears in a couple pages of Eclipse. What was it about the character that made you want to explore her story further?
A: In the beginning, I wasn’t fascinated specifically by Bree — it was the newborns in general. While I was writing Eclipse, there was a lot going on behind the scenes, of course, things Bella didn’t know about. Because I was focused on Bella, I couldn’t delve too deeply into the newborns’ story, however, there was always in my mind a general idea of what they were up to. I had to think about that while I was pacing the plot: Bella is at this point, the newborns are doing this. To keep it all straight, eventually I made a calendar of the months of May and June — which is all Eclipse deals with — and wrote down on each square what was going on with Bella that day and what was happening in Seattle. So the story of the newborns was always a big part of the story of Eclipse. And it made me kind of sad that there was no way to express any of that in the book.
Bree is the only newborn mentioned by name in Eclipse, the only newborn who has contact with the Cullens (aside from being killed by them), and the only newborn who encounters the Volturi in the clearing. She lives the longest, so she is the narrator who can tell the full story. She was a natural choice to chronicle the story of the newborns. Once I started writing from her perspective, she really came alive. So much so that, as the inevitable end got closer, it was really depressing going ahead. It was harder for me to kill Bree than any other fiction character I’ve ever killed, even though I was killing her for the second time. (Before Bree, the saddest was Walter in The Host.)
See the rest in USA Today.
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