Mormon writer proves she's . . . A novel writer

Best-selling author Stephenie Meyer never wanted to be a writer. In fact, if she hadn't married and started a family, she would have gone to law school.

"That was what my goals were," the Brigham Young University graduate said in a phone interview from Phoenix. "I never considered writing at all because it's too scary. You let people see what you're thinking in kind of an unprotected form and that seems like a really big vulnerability to me. But apparently I'm supposed to be a writer, and if you have a talent that's been given to you, you're not always allowed to ignore it."

Known for the popular "Twilight" series, Meyer's latest novel has nothing to do with vampires and everything to do with alien invasions and body snatching.

It took Meyer about a year to write "The Host" because she was also editing books for the "Twilight" series. "I'd have to go back and reread through all my notes and outlines and let it stew for about two days — that's about how long it takes to switch from one set of voices in your head to another — and then I'd work on it for a while until I had to go back to some clips from the 'Twilight' series.

"The only books that I've published are the 'Twilight' books so I think people think of me like those stories are the ones that are the most natural for me, but I've got a gazillion stories in my head and that's just the one that got out first."

The characters at the core of "The Host" are Melanie and Wanderer, two beings inhabiting one body. "They are two very specific, different people, and they're so different that in the beginning you can almost think of them as opposites. I guess they're as opposite as two good people can be. The two of them have really good traits and yet also kind of the bad traits that go along with those good traits. So, it was fun to play around with them coming to an understanding. The physical aspects of who we are are so secondary to the interior that they always felt very physically separated to me."

As with her other novels, love plays a major role in "The Host." But it's not just about romantic bonds. "What interests me in a story is the sort of ties between humans and why we are influenced by other people, and how they can change what we would want to do for ourselves because we are including them in our story," she said.