You've mentioned before that you've always wanted to be a writer, but what was it that initially drew you to the crime genre?
At first, I thought the genre came after the idea for this novel. I read an article about Bashar al-Assad, the former president of Syria, and got the idea for my book. Assad didn’t set out to become a dictator. I learnt that he lived in London and studied to become a doctor. But then his brother died, and he was pressured to go back to his family and ascend the throne. I thought that call to a corrupted life could be the basis of a fascinating character arc.
While reading the article, this woman came to me, Michelle. She lived happily in Amsterdam until she joined her husband in travelling back to his native country of Kazichia. And there he got pressured to ascend the throne – apart from that, there are no parallels with Assad in the novel, by the way.
I became obsessed with trying to figure out what I would do if I was her. Where I would draw a line in the sand and break up my family, deny my partner a relationship with his child. And after I finished developing that idea and wrote my first outline, it became clear that I was about to write a crime thriller.
At the time I thought, I never consciously decided that my debut novel would be crime. But now that the book has been out in the Netherlands for a couple of years, and I have had some time to reflect, I think it isn’t that simple. My whole childhood, I saw my father’s collection of Ludlum, Clancy and Follett novels on the shelves in the living room. Crime novels have always been around me, and I’m sure they had an influence. It can’t be a coincidence that my second novel, the one I’m working on now, is also a crime novel.
The Man with a Thousand Faces includes the fictional country, Kazichia, what process did you go through to construct such a convincing nation?
I love good world-building in stories, but I don’t want to build for the sake of it. It has to serve the theme and plot of the book. This book is about a woman who gets trapped in a country that is entirely unknown and unrelatable to her. So, to give any reader in the world that same experience, building a fictional country is a perfectly fitting plot device.
For me, the process of creating that country went like this:
-
First, I stated the underlying theme of the story, which is our ambiguous relationship with the truth. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and why we are with the partner we have.
-
I kept that thematic mission in mind at all times, which is why it ended up being a country in the Caucasus, ruled by a family that controls all flows of information, and that is filled with minorities that can’t agree on a single aspect of their world view – they don’t even agree on where the exact borders of the country are. In short: the truth is fluid in Kazichia.
-
To create Kazichia, I brainstormed for about three years in sprints. And I archived all my ideas in five categories: geography, culture, history, politics and cool places. I archive them to keep track of the balance: two hundred cultural ideas, but zero maps of the provinces would mean I could get stuck while writing. That last category is there simply because it would be a shame to come up with a country without designing cool locations for memorable scenes.
This ideation process goes hand in hand with outlining the plot. Once the outline is finished and I have done enough world-building, I read through all of my ideas and notes on the country one more time. Then, when I start writing the manuscript, I try not to look at the world-building archive again.
The best and most fitting ideas will stick with me or come up naturally when they are needed. And not going through the thousands of notes also makes it easier to kill my so-called darlings: the novel should be an unputdownable read, not an atlas on a fictional country. I probably used around three per cent of my actual worldbuilding. But I could write about it comfortably, because I knew it so well.
After the manuscript was done, I looked for sections that were missing world-building. Funnily enough, language was the main component that needed a lot of work. So, I added names of places and some lines in ‘Kazichian’ after the fact. Language hadn’t even been a category in my initial world-building, but it was a very obvious missing component once I started editing.
If you had to describe your protagonist, Michelle, in five words, what would they be?
Intelligent, ambitious, (too) loyal, materialistic and outspoken.
The Man with a Thousand Faces deals with fake news, blurred lines and the temptation of power. What is it about these themes that interests you?
The way people lie to themselves is fascinating to me. When it comes to justifying our selfish actions or the way we see the partner we chose.
In the novel, Michelle is married to a very wealthy man. The source of that wealth is corruption and cruelty, but she is so far removed from that source that she’s able to enjoy a luxurious lifestyle and tell herself she just fell for a guy in Amsterdam with a big wallet. But those lies won’t hold once she is faced with her family-in-law: people who stole industries during the collapse of the Soviet Union and suppress minorities to keep their position. And when Daniel starts slowly accepting the presidency of the country, claiming there is no other way to protect his family, she also has to face some hard truths about why she fell for this man. How could she be in love with someone that would choose this path? What does that say about her?
To tell that story in a convincing way, the lines have to blur slowly. And that theme, as I mentioned before, is reflected in the setting: a country in which controlling the narrative, and fake news are equally powerful weapons as bombs and guns.
If you were suddenly transported into the world of Kazichia, do you think you could defeat The Man with a Thousand Faces?
The mystery that (hopefully) keeps the plot going is the question: Who is The Man With a Thousand Faces? Who is the mysterious rebel leader who starts attacking the capital while Michelle is there with her family? I won’t spoil anything, but considering that I know who this rebel leader is, I could defeat him or her by revealing that identity. So, information could be my weapon in this case.
But if I didn’t know that truth, I wouldn’t get very far. There is a subplot in the novel about a soldier of fortune who gets dropped in Kazichia with the mission to find The Man With a Thousand Faces. This nameless soldier is considerably more capable than I am. I would probably get stuck at the airport car rental desk, trying to figure out if I need additional insurance or not.
