Week of August 21, 2008, Issue #670
EDUCATION
No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller
Fernie Thriller Writing Workshop and Retreat teaches the fine art of crafting a page-turner
CAROLYN NIKODYM / carolyn@vueweekly.com
‘It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
These famous lines opened Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford and have stood as a marker for how not to write fiction. These lines have even inspired an annual contest, daring writers to pen the worst novel opening they possibly can.
If you work with writer Mark Nykanen, who is leading a Thriller Writing Workshop and Retreat at Fernie’s Island Lake Lodge in September, you’ll soon learn that writing à la Paul Clifford has no place in any kind of thriller writing either.
“One of the things that I find really interesting is that when you’re working with writers—especially people who are committed to the craft—they oftentimes are doing it because they love words, and they love to be able to describe things,” Nykanen says. “The biggest struggle sometimes is to get writers to just tell their story, to just trust that they have this storytelling archetype within them.
“Don’t fall so in love with the prose that you lose sight of the story,” he adds. “In the thriller, that’s essential. Absolutely essential. Which isn’t to say that thrillers can’t be well written ... but if you are so in love with your prose that you’re willing to sacrifice your story, you’re not going to be very successful, no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s a thriller or literary fiction.”
With three psychological thrillers under his belt, Nykanen comes by this understanding honestly. And it isn’t just the prose writers have to worry about. Another element to a successful page-turner is making sure that the key characters are faced with decisions on every page. While the options don’t always have to have major consequences, they do have to leave tasty morsels for the reader to enjoy enough to see the tale right to the very end.
Characters also have to be multi-dimensional, protagonists a little bit evil and antagonists a little bit righteous.
“Bad thrillers don’t work for me—although some of them are extremely successful in publishing—but some of them don’t work for me because I just don’t buy the character. I don’t care about the character because the character is too thin. The character is a cartoon,” he explains. “So one of the things that I try to bring to writers is that if you really want to people to care about your book, they first and foremost need to care about the character.
“That doesn’t mean having a character who is wholly sympathetic,” he adds. “In fact, quite to the contrary. We all have the antagonist in us, all of us.”
The chilling villains, the dark and twisted subject matter of Nykanen’s work have made for some interesting reader reviews on amazon.ca. “My suggestion ... if you ever meet Mark Nykanen in a bar ... run for your life!!!!” and “I think it shows you what kind of twisted freaks they have in the world.”
If you mined Nykanen’s past life as an investigative journalist, you’d likely have enough material to fill a lifetime of thrillers. You’d understand how his digging into the darker side of life might serve to inform his own writing.
Nykanen entered the world of journalism at the tender age of 20, and it wasn’t long before he was in the thick of it, finding stories in prisons, in the inner city and in child pornography.
“I really saw the gritty side of things, whether it was the MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas in the early ‘80s, where one body after another was being taken out, or being in the slums of American cities covering drug issues and so forth,” he explains. “I’ve had this whole world of really gritty stuff. Not just simply seeing it, but interviewing people in depth.”
His ability to empathize with thousands of interviewees not only made him a good journalist, but it also allows him to draw characters with a depth of understanding. It’s a trait that he feels is paramount to successfully populating a novel.
Over the course of 15 years, Nykanen moved from print to radio to television, with his last stop in journalism as an international correspondent for NBC News. And he was good at it, too, earning four Emmys during his last four years at NBC.
The different media necessarily honed his writing skills, and he found the transition into television writing the most challenging. It forced him to be economical with his words.
At the height of his career, however, Nykanen found himself more and more drawn to fiction writing.
“I just couldn’t do [journalism] anymore. I had to write fiction,” he explains. “My last couple of years, I had to write fiction. No matter when I would get back to my hotel room, I was writing fiction, short stories and stuff like that. It was just the beginning. I was finding myself as a writer.”
Financially, the decision to leave NBC was not a wise one, but 20 years later, Nykanen has no regrets.
“When people say to me, ‘Well, I’m not sure whether I want to write,’” he says. “It’s like, you know what? You are either compelled to do it or you don’t. I wouldn’t trade any of my experience as a writer because it’s clearly been my path, and I think I would have been a very unhappy person if I hadn’t followed it.”
Nykanen’s path has included working with other writers on a regular basis. He finds that helping others sculpt their stories inspiring.
“I am always working on my own fiction, and you can get lost in your own work,” he says. “It’s a very different experience to suddenly work with someone else’s stuff. It freshens you in a lot of ways.”
Writing workshops aren’t just about the student-teacher relationship, either. Fiction writing is such a solitary exercise, that the kinship that develops between all participants is just as important to the experience.
“It’s feeling that sense of mutual support,” Nykanen says. “And also seeing the work that other people do. It can raise the bar for you and that’s a good thing, and it can also be very comforting in terms of your own progress, that your own work is very good.”
It’s that camaraderie, after all, that can stop you from penning your very own “It was a dark and stormy night” prose nightmare. V
If you have any questions about the workshop, contact Fernie Writers Conference coordinator Keith Liggett at keith@ferniewriters.org or call 250.423.6132. For booking information, visit islandlakeresorts.com or call 1.888.422.8754.
Social Bookmarking
Got something to say? Send a letter to the editor.
letters@vueweekly.com