Today I’m pleased to welcome Deryn Collier, a crime fiction writer, as she interviews Mark Nykanen. Nykanen is a four-time Emmy and Edgar-winning journalist, and acclaimed author of extraordinarily tense literary thrillers that feature protagonists who find themselves pushed to the absolute extremes of behavior and imagination.
Leave your labels at the door: An interview with thriller author Mark Nykanen
When I sat down with Mark Nykanen, I asked him to pretend to just be a thriller writer – at least for as long as it took to interview him for this blog post. He tried. He really did. But Mark has a tendency to break down barriers (or perhaps he just ignores them). And to him, strict lines between fiction genres are minor obstacles to step over in the process of writing a great story.
“When I sit down to write a novel, I don’t decide what genre it’s going to be,” said Mark. “I get interested in a character. That’s my reason for writing.”
It’s a method of working that has led to a broad and varied career as a writer and journalist. Prior to writing fiction, Mark won four Emmys for his investigative reporting at NBC News. His fiction work spans several genres, and has been published by St. Martin’s Press, Hyperion, Bell Bridge Books and, most recently HarperCollins.
If he had to pigeon-hole his most recent offering, Burn Down the Sky, published under the pseudonym James Jaros, he’d call it a post-apocalyptic thriller. “It has elements of science fiction – I’ve paid a lot of attention to world-building. But it has the same narrative tension and attention to language as my literary thrillers. It’s set in a time where we’ve returned to the baseline of humanity. The planet is destroyed. Food, shelter, water – these are the needs that are driving the characters, and the plot.”
“I knew I wanted to put a wildlife biologist into that situation. A woman. How would she respond to a debased environment? That was the question that drove the novel,” he said. “I often write female protagonists. I find that after the second wave of feminism, it’s a tumultuous time of change for women. They are just more interesting than men right now – they are forging change. I try to go beyond the standard issue “woman in peril” story, to deepen the female point of view and find the character’s motivation.”
“Of course, my antagonists are all men,” he added with a laugh.
I must admit that I’m not a big reader of speculative, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction. Mark’s literary thrillers like Hush and Primitive are more up my alley. But Burn Down the Sky kept me up way too late, several nights in a row. I was swept up in the quality of the writing – there was more depth there than I expected. Mark has managed to build a convincing world that draws the reader in, without moralizing over the current state of the climate.
When Mark and I met he had just that morning submitted his manuscript for the sequel, Carry the Flame, to his editor at HarperCollins. He was getting ready to start on his next project, a novel he is ghost writing. (He wouldn’t tell me for whom – I did ask.)
“I’ve been writing full time for more than twenty years, but ghost writing has really taught me something new: it’s made me realize just how much I love the process of fiction writing. I don’t get credit; there is no ego gratification,” he said.
“I work on a wide variety of projects – fiction and non-fiction. Sometimes the author has a great story, but they don’t have the ability to turn it into a novel. Sometimes I’m hired to write the whole thing.”
I asked why he thought people read thrillers, and Mark did pretend to be just a thriller writer for long enough to answer my question: “I think we find the dark side of our psyches intriguing. And reading thrillers is a safe way to visit our own worst impulses – of getting a vicarious experience. At least, if the author is doing his or her job properly.”
To find out more about Mark Nykanen, visit his website at www.marknykanen.com.
Deryn Collier is a crime fiction writer living in British Columbia, Canada. Her first novel, Confined Space, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished crime novel by the Crime Writers of Canada. She blogs crime fiction and life in the mountains at www.deryncollier.com, and you can find her on Twitter – @deryncollier.
