An Evening With Justin Cronin

Last updated on 27 December 2024

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It was the NZ summer of 2011-2012. My friend was reading a book with a creepy face on it and she couldn’t put it down. That’s the first time Justin Cronin’s The Passage appeared on my radar.

Skip ahead to the English summer of 2012. I’m in Oxford for the first time on a trip to wander around the city centre. A little bookshop is discovered where all the books are only £2 each. I see a pile of books with grey covers on a table, and instantly knew what it was. And that’s when I bought The Passage.

Since then, I’ve managed to buy/receive the other two books in the series (The Twelve and then the latest released The City of Mirrors), and have now read them all. While The Passage was definitely my favourite of the three, there was no way that I wasn’t going to hear Justin Cronin himself at one of the libraries here in Auckland. As part of his Aus/NZ tour, Auckland was his first stop in New Zealand before heading down to Wellington, Dunedin and Christchurch.

I’ve only been to one other author evening, and that was actually in Oxford, England too, when I went to hear R.J. Anderson talk about her book Ultraviolet. The evening went along the lines of drinks and nibbles, intro to Justin, he then read an excerpt from the last in the series, The City of Mirrors, and then he took questions. After that, we all lined up in an orderly fashion (though as orderly as New Zealander’s can be), and had our books signed. But I just wanted to have a chat about just a couple of things he talked about (I recorded the Q&A session, and I’m so glad I did, because he said a lot of great stuff).

You can read more about this session on Blogger’s Bookshelf next week where I go into further detail about these topics and others.

The Story

“When I started the Passage, I didn’t know if anyone would even want to publish it – coz publishing hates it when you do something different…and I just jumped the tracks completely.”

Like most author-meets and author interviews, one of the questions asked was along the lines of ‘how did the story come to be?’, and the story behind the story is quite cool. In 2005, when his daughter was 8, Justin would run while his daughter would bike for an hour after school, for about 90 days. And to pass the time, they told each other stories. 90 days went by, and while there was another book that he was supposed to be writing, he decided to type up some of the notes that he had on the story he and daughter had talked about/started together. It ended up being 30 pages long. And 30 pages of notes is not something to move past or save for another day.

“And so I decided I’d write the first chapter, just to see how it felt, how it sounded – did it have a voice?” He said that every story needs a voice, otherwise it’s just a bunch of information and facts in order. You need an entry point. “And I wrote the first sentence, and never stopped.”

So did his daughter get any of the royalties? Of course not. “But I get to send her to college … and I bought her a pony.”

One of the things I thought was interesting that he briefly talked about was how much the world and it’s current events impacted him and the story. “Write about what’s bugging you”, he said. At that time in the world and in America it was quite a dark time. Hurricane Katrina had just happened, Hurricane Rita was threatening to sweep through his home … there was all these things that impacted the story, and what it would become.

I think one of my favourite things that he said was “Writing is like a magic show of the imagination”. And that is so true.

The Movie?

So will there be a movie? The immediate, no-hesitating answer was: No. They couldn’t do it. It’s too big.

And I totally hear him on this one. There is no way you could make a movie out of this book – even the first one. You couldn’t do it. There are too many characters, too much going on, and you can’t take out a character and still have a functioning, good story. Every character is vital because they’re all connected. They all impact each other, it’s a web.

But (and here’s the good news), it looks like a TV series is a-go. There have been a couple of hiccups along the way, but it’s looking like there’s a TV deal, through Riddley Scott’s company. Television is incredible at the moment, and everyone has ‘a show’. There are fantastic writers in TV at the moment, as Cronin pointed out, and he’s right. TV is where it is at. I’ve said it before, there’s just something about a TV show that’s so much better than a movie, especially with the incredible shows that are out there at the moment, and have been popping up for the past couple of years. Fingers crossed that the TV deal for The Passage series goes ahead, because it would be incredible.

Like I mentioned, you can read more about what he talked about over at Blogger’s Bookshelf next week, where I talk about these things too, but also share what he said on genre, and formula fiction, and on further works in The Passage world. It’s a lot more in depth, and in interview form, so make sure you have a look.