Natasha asked Justin Cronin:

For you is writing more a cerebral procedure or an emotional one? Do you usually write away or do you think each sentence through?

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.

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