Ask the Author: Justin Cronin
Answered Questions (27)
Justin Cronin
After a decade telling one story, I have a pretty big backlog of other things I want to write. At this point, I’m still combing through all of it to decide which to pursue. My rule is that I should write the book that asks me to write it, and at this point, I’ve narrowed it down to two projects. But I haven’t picked yet, so I’ll have to leave it there.
Justin Cronin
The City of Mirrors is, indeed, the final chapter in the story of Amy, Alicia, Peter, et al. That said, I hope to return someday to this world, to tell a few stories that couldn’t make it into the three books.
Justin Cronin
This answer may seem a little glib, but all the characters are based on everybody—that is, the sum total of my experience of other people (and myself) is where the characters come from. But I also borrow friends' names all the time. A pal of mine asked me if he could be in the third book, and right about then I was about to make a new character, a member of Michael’s crew who are fixing the Bergensfjord. My friend is a tall, handsome guy, a former professional athlete turned coach. He also happens to have a great Polish last name and a patch of white hair in his otherwise black beard. I said, “Sure, as long as you don’t mind being tiny and dying in the end," and thus was born Patch Szumanski.
Justin Cronin
What I meant was this: writing is an extension of the writer’s character. What concerns me as a person, what I think a good sentence is, what a story ought to do and how it should transmit that information. There’s a lot more to it, but it boils down to the inevitability of one’s own personality on the page. You can make certain adjustments to suit a particular tale, but in the end, your voice is your voice.
Justin Cronin
In fact, we have a deal for a TV show, which I think is a better fit than the movies (too many characters, too much plot, all of it hard to unpack). Details to come.
Justin Cronin
The beauty of the vampire story is that you can attach pretty much anything you want to it, in terms of personal or public worries. The 1992 movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” for example, was really a movie about AIDS. The vampires of THE PASSAGE are meant to encapsulate a number of anxieties, but I’ll give you one, and it’s the one almost nobody mentions. That line: “They come from above.” Sudden death from the skies, in other words, and what I was thinking about when I wrote that line was the planes of 9/11, which came from above and pretty much rewrote our entire geopolitical reality.
Justin Cronin
My tastes are pretty eclectic. I read a great deal of literary fiction, especially when I’m writing. When I’m feeling depleted, I often reach for a writer who makes fantastic sentences; during the writing of The City of Mirrors, I reread virtually everything Ian McEwan ever wrote. When I read a writer like that, I come back feeling refreshed and ready to write. But I’m also reading THE EXPANSE series, a good old fashioned space epic. My son and I saw the TV show and loved it (he’s 13) and decided to read the books together.
Justin Cronin
This is a great catch! The answer is yes, although I didn’t recognize the echo until long after I’d written the scene, when I was going through the copy edits. I used that story in my classes for years and I guess it just got inside me, as all great stories do. The story is called “The Expert on God”; the writer is John L’Heureux.
Justin Cronin
To answer your second question ...
The one thing I’ve heard a lot about is actually a question: What's going on in the rest of the world, beyond the North American continent? Readers seem to have a lot of urgency about this. Suffice to say, the answer will come in The City of Mirrors.
The one thing I’ve heard a lot about is actually a question: What's going on in the rest of the world, beyond the North American continent? Readers seem to have a lot of urgency about this. Suffice to say, the answer will come in The City of Mirrors.
Justin Cronin
Currently scheduled for a May 24, 2016 release.
Justin Cronin
A big chunk of my childhood was spent in New York, and I visit the city fairly frequently. And yes, you are correct about Zero, so NYC will figure in The City of Mirrors, as will more of Texas, where I live now. I’m very glad when people say nice things about my use of setting; one of the things I’ve tried to do from the outset is to ground the world of The Passage in real places and be faithful to their details—buildings, distances, weather, etc.
Justin Cronin
Two novels that really blew my doors off are The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson and The Son by Phillipp Meyer. (Two books with the word ‘son’ in the title—don’t know what that means.)
Justin Cronin
Two novels that really blew my doors off are The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson and The Son by Phillipp Meyer. (Two books with the word ‘son’ in the title—don’t know what that means.)
Justin Cronin
I’d say it’s cerebral, though that includes the emotional aspect of the process—you have to think with ‘emotional intelligence’ for the story to work, to feel alive. The other part of the process is one I’d call ‘tactical.’ A big story with a complex plot—one in which a number of different threads are interacting with each another, often across large gaps of time and space—needs a lot of planning. Every scene has to serve a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is to illuminate a character’s inner life. Sometimes it’s to create a pause in the action to modulate the tempo. Sometimes its a splashy action scene with a lot of physical mechanics to consider. And so on. But whatever it is, you have to think of it in terms of both its emotional logic and its effect on the overall shape of the tale.
Justin Cronin
Two novels that really blew my doors off are The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson and The Son by Phillipp Meyer. (Two books with the word ‘son’ in the title—don’t know what that means.)
Justin Cronin
Currently scheduled to release May 24th, 2016.
Justin Cronin
I always plan everything in great detail. I began volume one with a detailed outline and summaries of the next two volumes. When I got to volume two, I planned it all out before I started; the same for volume three. Within that framework, there’s plenty of room for discovery and improvisation, but on any given day, I know what I have to accomplish.
Justin Cronin
Currently scheduled to release on May 24th, 2016.
Justin Cronin
I have no boss. Also, my commute is about fifty feet—out the back door to the garage and up the stairs to my office. The dress code is very casual.
Justin Cronin
There seems to be some motion on the TV front. That’s all I know.
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