"Twilight fans may be surprised to know that Stephenie Meyer at one point outlined an alternate ending for Eclipse, the third book in the series. At the time, Meyer explains that publishers worried the series would go stale if there were too many books so the plan was to cut it off at three.
While Meyer already had ideas about her characters’ stories well beyond a third book, she consented to work out an ending for Eclipse that would have brought the series to a close. In August of 2010, Stephenie gave an interview currently available at twilightseriestheories.com where she talked about the thought process that went into that alternate ending, but ultimately declined to give its major details.
That’s because she says there’s still a chance that she might write out the alternate ending and make it available for her fans. She’s just worried that fans will then see that ending as the real one and the book ending as fake, and she’s cautious about anything that would disrupt her story’s continuity for her fans. Here’s what she had to say about it."
“See if I tell them, I can’t write. And so that becomes…’cause then you’ve destroyed it. But um, there was a certain point in time not as much faith in the series and I was told to end it at three. And I’d never planned to do…you know I was…There were three books right? There were supposed to be three books and there was no idea of it going on, and in my head it was this long series.
And so it was like: ‘No, we should end this.’ Because you know if you go on too long sometimes series lose their steam or whatever. And the story was just so wide open then. There was so much that wasn’t done and so to have ended it there, it would have had to be a radical ending. Um, radically different.
There [were] some fantasy elements that I don’t think people would’ve seen coming. I don’t think they would have responded well. My mom hates it! Hates the ending. My sister was cool with it.
And you know I could see that because there were things…Some people, the way they’re tied to the characters are dependent on certain aspects of those characters, and now I’m gonna sound really really bad but it messed with that for some people.
But then once I started thinking about it I was really intrigued by that conversation. There was this really dramatic scene and Bella doesn’t know what’s going on and the visuals in it were really strong for me. And so then I wanted to write it.
You know back when nobody cared about the books and I could do whatever I wanted, I was like Bree, it was gonna be on the website. That was the plan all along. I would write up this alternate ending, but will people throw rocks at me if I write this? There’s a possibility!
Oh and then people will think: ‘Oh this is the real ending and that’s the fake ending.’ When it’s not you know…this is just an alternate. This is the way it could’ve gone."Iiiiiiiiinteresting!
If I had to read an alternate ending where Bella chose Jacob to live (literally) happily ever after and Edward disappeared into forever to be eternally alone... argh, I'm just not sure I could make it :/
- Lorabell
