Kobo ReWriting Life - #41 - Plotting a Compelling Thriller with Ruth Ware

0:05Hey writers, you're listening to the Kobo Rewriting Life podcast, where we highlight an episode from our backlist that will bring you insights and inspiration for growing your self-publishing business. I'm your host, Tara Kremen, director of Kobo Writing Life. This week, I'm highlighting an interview from 2023 with best-selling author of psychological crime thrillers Ruth Ware. Ruth's novels have been translated into over 40 languages, as well as adapted for TV and film, notably Netflix's The Woman in Cabin 10, starring Keira Knightley and Guy Pearce. What a stellar cast. In this interview, we discuss Ruth's journey to becoming a full-time writer, how she develops the plot for her thrillers, and what her writing process looks like.

0:52So, hope you enjoy!

0:55Ruth Ware: Okay, we are joined today by bestselling author Ruth Ware. Ruth, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Now, could you just kind of kick us off by telling our listeners a little bit about yourself? Well, I always feel a bit guilty when we get to this part because, as I point out on my website, my books are by far the most interesting thing about me. My life is very pedestrian. I basically uh operate in the sort of lockdown triangle that we all had between the grocery store my kids school and my office in a sort of except that's my daily life outside of lockdown but no you know I always wanted to be a writer it was always my ambition right from when I was a kid so I think just you know every day I wake up and feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to do this for a living.

1:45It's not something that I take for granted. And I hope it's something that I will never take for granted. And yeah, every day I wake up and feel incredibly happy that I get to do this.

1:56Ruth Ware: So if writing was the like childhood dream, how did you achieve it? How did you make your author dreams come true? Mainly by writing a lot of books that went under my bed is the short answer. I always wrote right from when I was a little girl and sort of started off writing these little stories that just got longer and longer until I guess by the time I was a teenager, I was writing sort of full length things. I'm not sure I would call them books, but they were kind of long stories of several hundred pages. And I never did anything with them. I never really showed them to anybody apart from once or twice to my best friend, who's very supportive.

2:34So she was basically the perfect audience. She was the kind of person who would say this was great, but there's just a few tiny things I would say. She was like, you know, sort of editor and best friend in one. And then as I got older, I carried on writing and I suppose I'd sort of kind of clocked the idea that like the book trade was a thing and that some people, you know, did get paid to do this. But I never really felt like it was something that was open to someone like me. I didn't know any writers growing up, you know, Being a professional writer just seemed like it was something that other people did.

3:08So I did a variety of jobs and ended up working in the book trade, which on the one hand was an incredible privilege to be working with all these incredible books and writers. I loved reading for a living and talking to people about books all day. But on the other hand, it gave me this huge attack of stage fright because I suddenly realised like quite how tough the competition is to get published. And I think just at the stage when I might have been sort of thinking about, you know, maybe I might want to do this more seriously, maybe I might start to want to sub to people. It kind of had the effect of sort of sending me right back into my shell.

3:47So I carried on writing, but I didn't really do anything with the books. They just all went under my bed. And it was only when I was on maternity leave with my second baby. and I just suddenly realised like basically my writing is a hobby and I don't have time for hobbies anymore you know at that stage I barely had time to brush my teeth let alone do anything more complex and I thought if I don't find a way to make this pay to monetise it I am just not going to have time to do this until the kids have gone to school which basically it was a kind of use it or lose it type thing. I thought I have to try to find a way to justify this space in my life.

4:29And for me, that was trying to get published and trying to earn enough money to pay for some additional childcare so that I could cut down on my full-time job and spend a bit more time doing what I loved. And thank goodness I did. And that book turned out to be my first published novel.

4:46Ruth Ware: And at what point did you make the transition to full-time writer? Because you are a full-time writer now, correct? I am a full-time writer now. Yeah, it was quite a number of books in. I'd actually written for teenagers before I started writing crime. So I'd written five books for teenagers and then two crime novels. And The Woman in Cabin 10 was, I think it was out and it was in the bestseller lists in the UK and the US. And I was being invited to tour places and go, you know, go, go abroad. And I was having to turn everything down because I basically barely had enough time to write, let alone, you know, do my job as well.

5:29And I just thought this is, this is, you know, ridiculous. Like I need to be doing this full time. I'm doing everything badly and I need to concentrate on one thing or the other so at that point I did resign but I think I had waited as long as I had because I was fiercely aware of how difficult it is to make a long-term career in writing and how like how much of a challenge it just is to sort of keep hitting the bullseye each time and so every book I'd sort of thought well you know maybe the next one, I'll feel confident enough to go full time. And yeah, eventually it was The Woman in Cabin 10 that sort of pushed me over the edge.

6:09And were you always drawn to thrillers? What is it about that genre that you love writing so much? Well, the funny thing is, I absolutely adore writing thrillers. I hope that comes through in my books. But when I was growing up and when I sort of first started writing, it was the one genre that I don't think I ever experimented with. I wrote romance and sort of, I guess, literary fiction, you would call it. It was my attempts at literary fiction and sci-fi and fantasy and kind of, I guess, sort of more straight down the line thrillers, more kind of adventure novels. But I don't think I ever wrote a kind of a crime novel or a whodunit.

6:51and it wasn't until I had coffee with a friend and she was saying that she had never read a thriller set on a hen night and I suddenly was like oh my gosh no I haven't either and I would love to this is a book that I would love to read and at that point I had written five novels for teenagers so to switch and write crime for an adult audience was quite the sort of left turn And I went to my agent and said, you know, I think I think I really want to write this book. And to her credit, you know, she could have said, no, you know, you've spent a long time building up, you know, an audience. You should stick with what you're doing well.

7:30But she didn't. She said, you know, yeah, if you want to go for it, we'll make it work kind of thing. And that was in a dark, dark wood.

7:37Ruth Ware: Do you have any desire to revisit those other genres and write and publish a romance novel or a sci fi fantasy book? Well, I think one of the lovely things about crime is that it's an incredibly elastic genre. You know, there's space within crime for, you know, quite a lot of romance, quite a lot of procedural novels have a real will they, won't they at the heart of them. That kind of Mulder and Scully dynamic, you know, there's a lot of specfic in crime now. I think Sarah Pinborough showed people that crime could have elements of, you know, not quite direct realism in her books. I don't want to provide any spoilers, but I think crime has become a much more capacious genre than it was sort of, you know, in the 1930s and 40s, when it was very much, you know, your straight laced detective solving a crime and then knotting it all up at the end of it.

8:31it's much more possible to write sort of much more, much more thrillery thrillers and much more, you know, and still consider yourself part of the crime community, which I love. But I think, you know, if I found a story that I wanted to write, I would absolutely follow that. I hope my readers would come with me. I think, you know, there are people who are very devoted to the crime genre, but I don't think that there's anything, you know, if you proved you can tell a story and make it fun. I hope that people would trust you to do that in other genres. What does your writing process look like? Because when you write thrillers, there's lots of like twists and turns.

9:09Do you know what those are before you tackle the majority of your writing? Do you always know how the book will end? How does that work? I pretty much always know who's done it in the case of most of my novels. I often know some of the twists. So although I have a whole thing about this, whether something is a twist or a reveal. And I think my books mostly feature reveals rather than twists. You know, it's something that a piece of the puzzle that the reader knows is missing, and they're making guesses as to what that piece might be. And then hopefully when you reveal it, it's a surprise to them.

9:47But I think a twist is much more in the nature of it's a piece of the puzzle that the reader had no idea was there. They weren't looking for it. They weren't expecting it. It's something that's kind of sprung onto the reader. And I don't tend to write those quite so much. Some of my books do feature twists, but most of them I would say feature reveals. In general, I know the kind of the big blocks of the plot before I start. I don't really plot in a conventional way. I don't sit down and kind of write out a synopsis or a chapter plan. But I do have the bones in my head. I usually have a pretty solid starting place.

10:22I normally have an idea of who did it and why. And I usually have an idea of sort of some of the big set pieces that will happen along the way. But exactly how that unfolds is all up for grabs. And sometimes the twist, the best twist are the ones that completely surprise you. And you're like, oh my gosh, I never thought of doing that. A character will refuse to do something that you wanted them to do, or will go completely off tack and do something that you never expected. and that can be a really fun way of discovering a twist organically and I think those are often the ones that work best.

11:00Ruth Ware: Do you ever have one of those moments where a twist or reveal is revealed to you as the author and it just completely obliterates the plans you had for the book and how you wanted it to end? Very, very occasionally, yes. I've had a couple of examples of those in my career and it's difficult to, mostly you just get a brilliant idea and you think, oh, I'm going to run with that. That's fantastic. And it's not necessarily a surprise. It's more kind of something that you've been sort of trying to feel your way around. And then suddenly a solution comes to you and you're like, yes. Very, very rarely I have had things that have sort of upset what I was intending to do.

11:40And that's much more of a kind of wrestling match between your heart going, but this is a brilliant idea in your head going, it's going to mean a lot of replotting. So yeah, there's always a bit, but those, yes, when it happens and it's brilliant, then it is brilliant. And it's happened to the end of two of my books. One of them, it just kind of slotted in completely neatly. And the other one, it required quite a lot of replotting and rewriting to make it work, but it was worth it. I like the idea that your book is almost like coming alive and it's like so twisted that it's now giving you extra work.

12:17I think that's always the sign of when a book is well not always but often it's a sign of when it's working really well because it's when your characters have become so real to you that they are taking charge you know they are the ones who are calling the shots because you start to realize that actually the thing that you wanted them to do is not in their character and that's I think that's always really fun when the characters sort of take over and start bossing the writer around.

12:46Ruth Ware: I'd love to touch a bit on the settings of your books because they run the gambit. Like you have a book that'll take place in like across the entire city of London and surrounding towns. And then you'll have a book that's more claustrophobic, like on a cruise ship. Do you have a setting like, or a type of setting that you find more interesting to write or more challenging in a fun way? I always love doing just like cool settings that I would love to go to. That is my weakness, really. I think, you know, I spend a year more or less writing these books. And I always think I would rather spend my imaginary year somewhere really fun.

13:25I have huge respect for writers who can make, you know, a really ordinary suburban street extraordinary. You know, there are writers who do that so well, people like Louise Candlish and you know shari la pena who just take a kind of very regular suburban house and show you they sort of peel it back and show you the darkness beneath but my weakness as a writer is is going somewhere really fun in my imagination and yeah i've taken myself off on cruises in norway i've still never been on a cruise you know to skiing resorts to mansions in the scottish highlands to stately homes in Cornwall. I would say my favourite type of setting to write is one that is quite self-contained, mainly just because it means that you can really explore it.

14:16And also, I think because my personal nightmare is being somewhere and something happens and you can't escape. And that comes up again and again in my books. Someone gets somewhere, something happens and they can't get away and they're trapped with the consequences. And those elements were there right from In A Dark, Dark Witch. You know my character in that has gone on a hen night. It's this very seemingly idyllic house in the sort of remote Northumberland forest. But once she is there and her lift is not available, bad things start to happen, but she can't leave. So, yeah, I think that's all of me working through my personal phobias about, you know, going to a hideous party and like the person who was supposed to give me a lift home has gone and got drunk and now I'm stuck.

15:05Ruth Ware: Is there like a dream vacation setting that we're going to see in an upcoming novel? Oh, almost certainly. Yeah, it would be a spoiler to reveal some of my upcoming ideas. But yes, I've definitely got fun places that I would love to tick off. I think you need to start traveling to those places like as a research trip. I know. Well, I always think I missed out on this. I always intended on taking a cruise for cabin 10. And I had really quite small kids at the time. So childcare was a massive headache. And I never managed to go. And now I sort of think, how could I somehow persuade HMRC that this was a legitimate business expense that I had to go on a cruise afterwards?

15:46But I always think that about Agatha Christie's settings, like murder on the Orient Express or death on the Nile. Was that just a big excuse for her to take a Daha Bia down the Nile and write it off as writing expenses? I saw that you were recently part of kind of like a retelling of Miss Marple in a short story collection. What was that experience like? Have you always been an Agatha Christie fan? Oh, it was huge fun. I mean, I am a big Agatha Christie fan. I've spoken about that in interviews before, which I suspect might be part of the reason why I was one of the writers invited to do it, because I'm really open about my admiration for her plotting and her, you know, her characters and setting and so on.

16:28And she's been a huge influence on kind of how I sort of view the perfect crime plot in terms of, you know, the way the writer has to play fair with readers and the clues that you have to drop. And then hopefully that sort of, you know, satisfying snap moment as everything kind of clicks into place. I think all of that I took from reading her books as a teenager and kind of absorbing the fact that that was how crime is supposed to work. So yes, as soon as I got the invitation, I was like, oh my gosh, yes. And although some of my favourite books of hers are standalone books or Poirot books, the character that I love the most out of all of Christie's characters is Miss Marple.

17:14So that was my absolute dream was to be asked to to write a Miss Marple story and we were given some quite uh strict parameters um we couldn't have crossover uh with Poirot they didn't want us to change too much about Miss Marple's early life so you know no going back and introducing a lost love interest which always seems to be what the tv shows want to do it was have to have sort of some reason why she's single some tragic past and one of the things that I love about her most as a character is that she is single and she's completely, you know, she's completely self-contained and there's no sort of justification needed for why she's a spinster.

17:54She just is. And she's happy with that as far as, you know, anyone would know from the novels. So we've had, we sort of, we were all given this brief and within it, we had to come up with our own idea for a story. And I knew straight away that I wanted to do a Christmas story. Poirot has not one, but two Christmas stories, a story and a novel. and Miss Marple doesn't really. She has a Christmas story but it's a sort of rather sad one that's about a woman who's out Christmas shopping for her husband and ends up being murdered. So there's really nothing Christmassy about it apart from the fact that she's doing her shopping when this happens.

18:31And I always thought I want to give Miss Marple a very traditional English Christmas which Christy wrote about beautifully in a novel. She loved Christmas in an essay. She loved Christmas and was intensely nostalgic about the Christmases of her childhood. And having read this, I was like, right, I want to give Miss Marple this Christmas. But one of the things that I hadn't anticipated when I sat down to write the story was what an absolute joy it was to have a predetermined set of tools and characters to work with. And as a standalone novel writer, you know, none of my books are connected. They're all completely individual universes, totally different characters.

19:13It does feel a little bit like reinventing the wheel every single time. And so to have, you know, the sort of the fear of the blank pages, you sit down and you think, I've got to do this all again from scratch. To have a kind of a set of tools and toys and sort of characters handed to you was just, you know, just the biggest pleasure in the world. It may be very envious of series writers, although I'm sure they have their own challenges.

19:39Ruth Ware: Do you have a favourite Agatha Christie novel? I guess I have several favourites for different reasons, but I think the most perfectly plotted one, the one where I think she's sort of operating at absolute virtuoso status is probably And Then There Were None, just because it's so cleverly constructed. And I guess because it's not a detective novel, there is no detective. It sort of feels the purest in a way, because it's just the conversation between you and her. There's no sort of friendly Poirot to say, aha, my Hastings, I have noticed something, you know, and make me like, oh, there's a clue.

20:16So it's, yeah, I think that's the one that I admire the most. You've also written in a lot of different, I guess, sub genres of crime thriller fiction. Is there one you find most fun to read or write? Oh, it's a good question. Yeah, I don't think I could pick one. I just finished writing Zero Days, which is my book coming out this July. And that is much more of a sort of straight thriller. There is a strong whodunit element to it. But it's more of a kind of, I guess it's sort of leaning more towards the sort of Jack Reacher kind of end of the crimey scale. My main character is a fairly badass pen tester who goes on the run so there's a lot of sort of quite traditional thriller elements in terms of you know her being sort of ducking and diving and evading the police and so on and that was huge fun to write mainly just because it was a bit different from all of my previous books and it enabled me to write action scenes which you know normally my characters are kind of regular people who have what would probably be my reaction when faced with physical danger which is to sort of screech you know run as far as they can unless they can't at all avoid it so it was really really fun writing a character who sort of faced up to that a bit more and sort of engineered the events of the plot a bit more and yeah I really enjoyed doing that I would definitely that's something I would love to do again in the future but I think I would struggle to pick a kind of a favourite I don't yeah I don't think I really have I love all of my books in different ways and they've all given me sort of unique pleasures in terms of, you know, the locked room mystery and the sort of, you know, the death of Mrs.

22:02Westaway is much more kind of country house, sort of Daphne du Maurier style, gothic. Turn of the key is kind of plays with sort of ghostly themes and so on. So yeah, I wouldn't, I couldn't choose one of them.

22:16Ruth Ware: It's like we're asking you to choose your favourite kid over here. I guess that's not really fair. I was just thinking that it's kind of a hard question. But I guess the nice thing about you writing standalones is that you can kind of explore all the different genres and you don't have to stick to one for a long series. Yeah, no, exactly. I think that's the great advantage of being a standalone writer is that you don't box yourself in in quite the same way as series writers do. And I know from, you know, I joke about being jealous of series writers and in some ways I am, but I know from some of my friends who write series that it comes with its own unique sense of challenges in terms of you know the rules that you set for yourself in book one and you know you'll casually make your character an only child and then you know 10 books later it'll be really really convenient if they could have a sibling but they can't because you said in book one that they didn't so you know you don't have to I can reinvent everything up to the point at which I press send to my editor and that's a and even after until it's printed, which is, yeah, to be sure, a great advantage.

23:18Ruth Ware: And we were talking to another mystery thriller writer, and the only way you can introduce a sibling 10 books in is a surprise twin, which is never a fun twist. No, exactly. And also there's a limit to how many times you can pull that sort of thing. You know, obviously you probably wouldn't have more than one surprise twin anyway, but, you know, I think readers after a while start to get a bit irritated with too many rabbits out of a hat. You're like, hang on, you didn't mention this part of the universe. Sort of like getting to book five and then finding out that, you know, actually space travel is possible.

23:52And everyone's like, what?

23:55Ruth Ware: Surprised quintuplet. So you've touched on zero days. So I think this is a great time to kind of dive into your upcoming release. Could you give our listeners kind of a spoiler free synopsis? I know that's very hard because there's a lot happening in this book, but I believe you can do It is. Yeah, it is a difficult book to sum up without too many spoilers. But I'll give you the kind of the premise in the first couple of chapters, which is relatively spoiler free. So my main character, Jack, is she's a pen tester. And that's something that I've had to explain to people quite a few times over writing the novel.

24:29so a pen tester is like a security expert who acts as the attacker breaks into buildings or secure systems uh in order to sort of see how well the defenses hold up uh so one day she's out on a kind of routine job she's doing a pen test on a finance company it all goes a bit horribly wrong and she ends up accidentally being arrested but anyway she gets it all sorted out comes home from the police station and discovers that while she's been away, her husband has been murdered. And at first she's treated as the grieving widow by the police, but gradually she becomes aware that they suspect her and that she's probably about to be arrested.

25:10So at that point, she has the choice between sitting tight and hoping that the police figure out their mistake or taking matters into her own hands, which obviously she does that because it makes a much better plot.

25:22Ruth Ware: And what drew you into this world of like pen testing and digital security? And how much research did you have to do in order to pull this off? So it was a research heavy book. I guess what drew me initially was I'd written a couple of books that were sort of tech adjacent. The turn of the key is about a woman who's living in a very, very kind of smart house and inverted commas, you know it's wired up with cameras all through and voice detection and you know the lights are all centrally controlled and the fridge chats to you and tells you what's in it and for that I had to sort of invent this kind of home management app that she had a very adversarial relationship with and then I went on and wrote One by One which is my novel set in a ski resort but has a tech company at the heart of it it's a corporate retreat and the people who've hired the chalet is a tech company who have this app called Snoop.

26:16And for that, again, I had to invent this app and sort of figure out how startup companies work and so on. So I ended up listening to a lot of startup podcasts and a lot of tech podcasts. And then as we went into lockdown, I found myself listening to many more podcasts because I couldn't write. I was stuck at home homeschooling my kids and, you know, baking banana bread or whatever it was we did all day. And podcasts were the perfect sort of way to keep my brain active while also having to get through all of this other stuff. And because I already had a lot of tech podcasts on my radio, I ended up kind of segueing into the sort of crimier, darker side of tech.

26:53And there were a few podcasts, but one in particular, Darknet Diaries, which is all about the dark side of the web in various iterations. But one subject that kept coming up on this was pen testers. And I was really fascinated by the idea of someone who is employed to act the attacker, like being asked to be nefarious, essentially, struck me as a really fascinating career. But of course, you know, the truth is that however secure a system is, you can't anticipate every way that someone will try to break that, you know, whether that's hacking in by sort of conventional means or whether it's exploiting what is often the weakest part of any system, which is the people involved in it.

27:37You know, people make mistakes, they choose easy to guess passwords, they give out too much information on the internet. And so you need a real person to go out there and act like a real attacker would. And until it's stood up to that, you don't know whether your system really is secure. So yeah, so I became completely fascinated by these people. And there's sort of two groups, they often overlap, but one set deals more with the sort of digital side and one set deals more with the sort of physical side. And I quickly realised that actually writing about digital hacking is very difficult. You know, there's a reason why in Hollywood films, they tend to sort of just bash away at the keyboard for 10 minutes before going, I'm in.

28:17You know, that's not how hacking really works in real life. But it's very difficult to write accurately about someone patiently running scripts for hour after hour. And to be honest, it required a level of knowledge that I just didn't have. But physical pen testing, where people try and break into buildings, that felt like something much more suited to a novel with lots of dramatic twists and turns. As I sort of quickly started to think, wow, it'd be really interesting to write a novel with a pen tester at the centre. And then it just all kind of spiralled from there. It's such a fun idea. And yeah, I had never heard of pen testing before.

28:54So it was really interesting to learn about. I would love to chat about the format of the book too. So it's broken into segments and we start off at minus eight days until we get to zero. So how did that concept come about? I might have to think about this for a minute. This bit probably isn't for broadcast because it's quite a major spoiler to say that the zero days sort of concept at the heart of it. Okay, I'll start talking and then maybe we can, yeah. I guess partly I just love the idea of a ticking clock. The idea that Jack is going to get caught. The UK is a really difficult country to go on the run in, partly because it's physically small and partly because it is one of the most surveilled countries in the world, possibly apart from China.

29:43But even China is big and sprawling and has rural areas where you can go hide out. The UK has one of the most joined up and comprehensive CCTV camera networks in the world. And of course, after COVID, increasingly everywhere is moving over much more to digital payment, which makes things like getting hold of money much more difficult. Not everywhere takes cash. It's almost impossible to get money out of an ATM without alerting the police to your presence. So I always knew that my character was going to get caught. And I loved the idea of a structure that played with that, a kind of ticking clock down to the day zero when she is caught up with.

30:27So, yes, there's other sort of elements in the plot that feed into that countdown, which I won't talk about because there's sort of mild spoilers. But I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that day zero is when the police catch up with Jack.

30:41Ruth Ware: and you're right the like ticking countdown really adds to the suspense and i was just in london recently and i want to go back now because i didn't pay attention to the cctv of it all because i have the attention span of dory from finding nemo but i'm so what you're saying is you would have been caught immediately immediately you know i could never get away with anything well i think the good thing is that facial good thing is that facial recognition is not quite at the level yet where the police can sort of or maybe it's the processing I don't know but it is still difficult you know there's a lot of manually going through footage and so on but yeah once you start spotting them CCTV cameras are everywhere and not just official ones you know almost all shops have them too and you know if the police are following the route of a suspect they can very often get footage from shops along the way, from shopping malls, from traffic cameras.

31:43But yeah, the other aspect of the surveillance network in the UK is that there's a hugely extensive network of traffic cameras. If you go into London now, you have to pay a congestion charge. That's all done by automatic number plate recognition. It gets charged back to your account if you don't pay it. All of that is done by a ring of pretty much impermeable CCTV cameras around the perimeter of the Capitol and then on all of the motorways as well. So yeah, it's one of those things you don't sort of think about day to day, but once you notice, you're like, and there's another camera.

32:17Ruth Ware: It's just a little unsettling. One thing I really wanted to talk about was like Jack is on a journey in this book, both physically, but also emotionally. And how did you balance the like heavy emotional beats of this book with the action to kind of keep it going? That was a really good question. The answer is I didn't really think about it that hard. I mean, the book opens with the death of her husband. And thankfully, my husband is still alive and well, but I've definitely suffered major bereavements in my life. And I think one of the things that crime fiction sometimes doesn't explore for understandable reasons, you know, particularly sort of golden age crime fiction, often the death that occurs in the book is much more there for sort of the purposes of setting up the puzzle for, you know, for precipitating the whodunit.

33:08and the actual emotional impact of the death often isn't really examined or is only sort of examined at the end when people sort of you know suddenly allow themselves to grieve and I was really interested in writing a novel and I sort of did tackled it a bit with the it girl but this one is much more kind of a much deeper dive into into the heart of that where the grief and the shock and the huge emotional impact of the death is kind of really front and centre and you're right Jack is um you know she wants to find out what's happened you know what happened to her husband and the truth about his death that is the kind of the major impetus for the plot but her struggle to come to terms with what has happened to him and to balance her own grief with her knee to find out the truth about why this ended up unfolding the way it did is like the emotional heart of the plot.

34:10But to answer your question about how I balanced it, I didn't. I just wrote it as I wanted to and tried to, I guess, just try to be realistic about how I thought I would be reacting if I were in that situation. And I know from having suffered bereavements in the past that there is this sort of weird situation where the world carries on and you carry on doing really mundane stuff and often doing it pretty well. You know, you can do your job, you feed your kids, you go to the shops, you know, you carry on putting one foot in front of the other, even while something in the back of your head is saying, but you can't, you know, everything has changed.

34:52How can you possibly be expected to carry on getting up in the morning? Why is the sun continuing to rise when the entire world has changed? And the truth is, of course, the entire world hasn't changed. And the death of one person, while a tragedy for you, is exactly what has been happening to humans for millennia. And the sort of the cruelty of that, but also in a weird way, the comfortingness of that was something that I sort of wanted to get across a little bit in fiction, I guess.

35:21Ruth Ware: Well, for not trying, you nailed it. Thank you. Well, that's very comforting to hear. That's almost the best kind of answer. It just kind of happened naturally. I mean, I think that's the thing about not plotting a huge amount. Like I am free to sort of figure that stuff out as I go along. I had a few scenes in mind when I started writing the book that I knew I wanted to get to, a few kind of set pieces, I guess. and as the structure probably indicates, the kind of the final showdown was always going to be the sort of 11th hour big bang. But outside of that, I very much just make it up as I go along.

36:02And that does give me the freedom to sort of do a little bit here, a little bit there, think, oh, I should have probably made her be a bit more sad again now. So yeah, it's very much the same way I cook. Pinch of this, pinch of that, see if it tastes good. If it doesn't, we go back into the drawing board. This book takes place in and around London and throughout her journey that we mentioned, Jack goes all over the city. Was it fun kind of including the different landmarks and did you do any like travel through her path? I lived in London for many years. So yeah, it was really fun returning to London in fiction and sort of, you know, putting in some of my own favourite locations.

36:44East London, which is where a lot of the book takes place, is just fascinating. You can sort of, you can peel back the layers of history and you know, the Thames is, it's sort of the dirty, kind of stinky, unfettered river that it It must have been throughout most of history, whereas in the sort of the west of the city, further upstream, it's been much more kind of sanitized. All the embankments have been built up. It feels like a much more kind of urban contained river, whereas in the east end where the river is much wider, it's much more sprawling. The banks are still sort of really pebbly and there's like stinking mud at low tides.

37:27I just I really enjoyed exploring that in my imagination and kind of going back to places that I'd loved but in answer to your question of whether I retraced any of Jack's steps no I didn't the brilliant thing now about Google Maps is that you don't have to do any of this you can just put in you know I'm cycling from here to there or I'm walking from here to there and then you think well I'll add on a bit because of the fact that you know she's she's not had a good night's sleep and she's got kind of limping a bit from the wound in her leg and maybe then subtract a bit because you know someone gives her a lift so yeah it's very much played by it and then of course you have to have an argument with your copy editor when you get to the end and they're like would she really have been able to get from a to b in 45 minutes and you're like i think i worked it all out but maybe i'll be able to go for it again here i forgot google maps existed and i

38:16Ruth Ware: was going to be like did you have a map of london with pins through it trying to figure out the best route? No, the internet exists. A lot of Google Maps, a lot of Google Maps route planning and sort of figuring out how. And that's the other lovely thing about surveillance is that you can, pretty much everywhere in London and all of New York, you can just drop a pin on a map and look up and see exactly what someone standing there would be seeing. But I do take, I always take liberties with all of my settings. You know, most of the roads mentioned in Zero Days. And in fact, most of my books are imaginary.

38:56So, the neighbourhoods are real and the descriptions of the architecture is real and the landmarks are real. But the individual houses and most of the roads are not real, partly because it gives me a little bit more freedom and partly because, you know, I don't want to accidentally kill someone at some real person's address and have them feel sad about that. I think it would weird me out if I came across it in a book. I'd be like, oh, oh my goodness, someone's claiming that a horrible murder happened in my road. So I think I wouldn't like that. So I don't do it to other people. I've never thought of that before as like something you have to think about for a thriller novel, but that makes a lot of sense.

39:34Like how creepy would it be to read about a death happening at your own house. That's a bit... Some writers feel fine about it. And I know, you know, I write a friend who like they'll pick, they'll literally go on Google Maps, they'll pick a house on a road and be like, that's where it happened. That's not how I write.

39:51Ruth Ware: One thing I wanted to touch on outside of Zero Days is in an interview last fall, you kind of discussed how you have a goal to write a book a year. And it's both like a goal to finish a book a year, but also as a way to maintain your creative well to make sure you're not overdoing it or overextenuating yourself. And I'm kind of curious how you came about setting this goal for yourself. If it's a goal, exactly. It's more just over the years, what I have realized I can comfortably achieve versus what is convenient for my publishers. So I think publishing loves regularity. It loves cycles. It has pinned me as a sort of summer reads author.

40:34So it's very convenient to my publishers if I come out kind of, you know, May, June, July, August sort of time frame. I think, you know, people love a thriller to pick up and read on the beach. So it's understandable. But I can't write more than a book a year. I'm in awe of people who can and I have friends who can and more power to them. But I can't. I just don't have the kind of capacity. I think imaginative capacity. It's not about the words, really. it's about how fast I can come up with scenarios and ideas and when I wrote a book a year while I was working and when I gave up work I thought oh great I'll be able to write two books a year now it turns out I can't I my imagination seems to refill at a set pace but there a few years ago I was sort of I was getting later and later with my deadlines and every year was becoming a bit more squeezed.

41:33And at that point, I said, I think I need to take a year out to kind of reset, come up with some more ideas. And then unfortunately that, well, I don't know if unfortunately, maybe fortunately, that year turned out to be 2020. So that was the year that I didn't write a book. And it wasn't, obviously, I didn't know when I said this to my publishers, what was going to happen. It turned out to be incredibly fortunate because there was no way I would have been able to deliver a book while also homeschooling my kids and, you know, having everybody around the house. my husband is a virologist so he was working you know 14 hour days and uh was you know wanted to be more helpful but just didn't have the capacity to do it whereas you know nobody needed me to to write another novel to save the world so fortunately i was able to take a break and felt incredibly lucky to do so but yes i and having done that i came out of it kind of absolutely fizzing with ideas, which was lovely because sort of going into it, I'd felt a bit kind of like, oh, I don't know where my next book is going to come from.

42:34But yes, I came out of it wanting, just desperate to write. And The It Girl, in spite of being one of my longest books, was one of the shortest ones to write, I think, because I'd had this year of not writing and feeling absolutely desperate. So yes, a book year seems to be about right for me at the moment with the occasional breathing space. And do you have any advice for aspiring thriller authors? Oh gosh I mean I always think if there was a magic formula I would either patent it and sell that and stop writing books. No that's not true I would never stop writing books or maybe I would just keep it to myself and not tell anyone else.

43:15But the truth is I don't think there are really any hard and fast rules. If there is a formula, I've certainly not discovered it. So I'm always a bit hesitant to give advice. But I think the thing that I always try to do is give people a reason to turn the page in terms of, you know, give them something that they want to find out, some question that your readers are interested in. And obviously, there's with a whodunit, that's very easy because that question is there on a plate for you. You know, the question that everybody wants to answer is who killed the person? What's the solution to the mystery that you've set up?

43:52But it's not enough to have one single question that you withhold the answer to for 360 pages. There has to be reasons to want to get to the end of the chapter because everybody knows they're not going to find out who done it for pretty much the length of the book. So I think it's really important to set up little questions, little conundrums, little things that your reader wants to find out. And I think I sometimes get asked to teach classes. And one of the examples I often use is the beginning of Gone Girl, where Gillian Flynn sets up this, you know, the big question is obviously what has happened to Amy Dunn.

44:30But in the first chapter, there's this brilliant throwaway line where Nick says something like, that was the fourth lie I had told to the police that day. And of course, you're immediately electrified you're like but why is he lying well what are the other three lies that he is told and she's very clever you know she sort of spins that out over the next few chapters you find out a bit you don't find out everything and I think that's just a really good example of just a really simple way to say to people that I'm keeping a secret from you but you're going to find it out fairly soon and that you know obviously once when I'd got to that line in Gongal I was like well I know I'm reading the next chapter.

45:06And that I think is what I try to give to readers as much as possible. But the other, the truth is that, you know, it's very difficult these days to write a book that hangs entirely on the solution. You know, we're in an age of spoilers and internet reviews and, you know, Twitter. I think if you write a book that has a very cool reveal or a very cool twist at the heart of it, it can become quite vulnerable to that twist being revealed. So I think the other thing that I always try to remember when I'm writing is that the reason to turn the page cannot only hang on the answer to those questions because someone might already know that.

45:48And ultimately, if you know the solution to the book or you know the secret of the twist, what's going to make you keep reading is the characters. And really giving people a reason to care about your characters is three quarters of the battle, I think. That's such a good point in the age of spoilers. Like they could figure out what the twist ending is, but they want to see how you get there and how the characters get there. So that's a really good point. And do you have any book recommendations for anyone who's looking to hone their thriller or spooky story skills? Oh, wow. Gosh, I feel like I should have made a list.

46:22I mean, I think there's lots of classics that people should read. Definitely, you know, some of the big Christie's just to see how the kind of plotting works. And then there were none, Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In terms of atmosphere and kind of character, I love Daphne du Maurier. I think Rebecca is obviously her best known book. And in terms of atmosphere and setting, that is amazing. But one that I keep coming back to again and again as a writer is My Cousin Rachel, because that book is so marvellously simple. It hangs on one single question, which is, did Rachel kill Ambrose?

46:56But you and the narrator sort of keep swinging backwards and forwards on that question. And she keeps you changing your mind and she keeps the narrator changing his mind. And sometimes you're in sync with the narrator and sometimes you're not. And it's just, it's a brilliantly done example of, you know, how much you can get out of a single question. But I would also really encourage people to read contemporary writers. You have to keep up with the genre. I would say Lisa Jewell is amazing. She does character fantastically. Claire McIntosh does brilliant procedurals. Lisa Unger does kind of fantastic psychological thrillers.

47:37Riley Sager. and then you know it just depends what kind of you know crime is a huge genre you can have sort of like real kind of southern gothic like f.e. cosby or you know like historical um crime like abir mukhaji um i think you just need to to figure out what you want to write and who is doing it best in your genre and then there's no shame in taking taking as much as you can from the people doing it brilliantly.

48:05Ruth Ware: That is such an excellent reading list. And I will be adding many of those books to my library, not as an aspiring thriller author, but just an enjoyer of the genre. And as an enjoyer of the genre, one thing I really wanted to ask you about was the murder mystery game that's available on your website, because I love a murder mystery game. I've hosted many, and I'm just so curious what the creation process was like and how it differed from writing a crime book. Well, this was another thing that came out of lockdown, primarily because I wasn't writing novels and also because we played a few murder mystery games over lockdown and I really enjoyed them but I came out of several of them thinking I could have written that better like I could have yeah I would have structured it differently I would have made the characters different and after a certain point I was like maybe I should just write one and initially I started writing it thinking that I would write it for my family for New Year's Eve as a kind of game and then I got really into it and obviously it took much longer to write than I had sort of anticipated they're pretty I'm sure this won't be news to anyone who actually makes them for a living but they're very complicated to construct and I didn't end up completing it in time for New Year's Eve so then I was like okay what can I do with this that I've now written um I thought well post it on my website you know everybody's stuck at home murder mysteries is something that translate to zoom really easily although you know obviously now we can do them over dinner as well and it was just like a fun little extra for readers to say you know here have something free thank you for buying my books so I hope people download it it's much more light-hearted and silly than than my books but it was fun approaching the sort of the problem of a murder from a very different angle well I for one cannot wait to download it and force my friends to come over and play please do send me photographs post them on twitter I will absolutely I will And we've kept you for a long time now, but we just wanted to hear about what you're working on next.

50:03Oh, well, what I'm working on next is much too much of an ugly stage to talk about. I get very superstitious. There's a particular stage where the book sort of a third finished. And I always think the thing is you always compare the book that you're writing with the one that you've just done, while forgetting that the one that you've just done has been through multiple edits and been sort of primped and you know groomed and honed into being its very best self whereas the version that's on your laptop is emphatically not yet its very best self it's not even finished so it's at that stage at the moment and I'm not going to talk about it in case I have to throw it all in the bin and decide that this was not the book that I wanted to write but I definitely am writing another book.

50:50There definitely will be another book. Hopefully this is the one that I'm writing and might have a very different setting. So you have to wait and see.

50:57Ruth Ware: Well, you respect the superstition and we will not cry. And where can our listeners find you online? So I am on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at Ruth Ware writer on all three. I am on TikTok, but only as an observer, I don't tick or talk. I have a, yes, I don't feel that's my natural métier. But yeah, I love to chat. Twitter's probably the place where I'm most kind of talkative. So if people have something to say, come find me there. Perfect. We will link to all of your socials and your books in our show notes. And Ruth, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. This was a delight.

51:31Yes. Thank you so much. This was so fun. Oh, thank you so much for having me both. It was lovely to meet you. Thank you for listening to the Kobo Rewriting Life podcast. If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to rate, review and subscribe. and if you're not already following us on socials please come follow us we are at Kobo Writing Life on Facebook, Instagram, threads and Twitter. This episode was hosted by Laura Granger and Rachel Wharton with production by Terrence Abrahams. Editing is provided by Kelly Robotham and our theme music is composed by Tearjerker. If you're ready to start your publishing journey sign up today at kobo.com writing life.

52:11Until next time happy writing. Thank you.