I got to look through her red eyes at us humans suddenly we were pathetic and weak, easy prey, of no importance whatsoever except as a tasty snack. Writing Bree was the first time I'd stepped into the shoes of a narrator who was a 'real' vampire - a hunter, a monster. In this case, instead of a synopsis, I found myself writing a day in Bree's life. This is the way it usual y works for me: I try to write a short synopsis of what is happening in some other part of the story, and I end up jotting down dialogue. From the start Bree was very clear as a character, and some of her friends also sprang to life effortlessly. I imagined the world as Bree understood it. I started thinking about living in the basement with the newborns and hunting traditional vampire-style. Because Bree is the only newborn Bel a sees, Bree's was the perspective that I first gravitated toward as I considered what was going on behind the scenes. My editor, Rebecca Davis, was a huge part of that process, and she had a lot of questions for me about the things Bel a didn't know and how we could make the right parts of that story clearer. The next step in the editing process was to step away from Bel a and see how the story flowed. Editing, not writing - when I was writing the first draft of Eclipse, I had first-person-perspective blinders on anything that Bel a couldn't see or hear or feel or taste or touch was irrelevant.

(The two other reasons are named Diego and Fred.) I started thinking about Bree while I was editing Eclipse. Those characters are the most effortless to write, and so their stories are usual y the ones that get finished.īree is one of those characters, and she's the chief reason why this story is now in your hands, rather than lost in the maze of forgotten folders inside my computer. Personal y, I've never figured out why some of my characters take on strong lives of their own, but I'm always happy when they do. We al are inspired and motivated in different ways we have our own reasons why some characters stay with us while others disappear into a backlog of neglected files.

No two writers go about things in exactly the same way.

The second life of bree tanner