Ruth Ware, author of 'The It Girl' - International bestseller talks about changing characters, going full time and the difficult middle
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2022
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ruth Ware is an international bestseller, who has just published her 7th crime thriller, 'The It Girl'.
It tells the story of April, a vivacious, bright girl at the University of Oxford, who quickly draws a group of friends into her dazzling orbit. Until, one morning she is found dead. 10 years later, new information surfaces about the crime, and changes Hannah's life... her testimony was key to sending a man to prison. It means, one of her friends might have done killed 'The It Girl'.
Ruth's books, 'The Lying Game', 'The Woman in Cabin 10', 'In a Dark, Dark Wood', 'The Death of Mrs Westaway', 'The Turn of the Key', and 'One by One' have all been huge bestsellers, and there's a lot of noise about her new novel.
We discuss her move from YA to adult, crime fiction. Also why the hardest part of writing crime, is figuring out why someone will try to solve the mystery. You can hear how she gets through the tricky 30k word mark, and why her writing space is almost perfect.
You can support the show at patreon.com/writersroutine
@writerspod
writersroutine.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, hoi, welcome along to writers' routine. This week we're chatting to the international |
| 0:13.7 | best-selling author, Ruth Ware. Ruth has just published her seventh novel, the psychological |
| 0:20.2 | crime thriller. It's called |
| 0:22.2 | The It Girl. Now, we talk about why she doesn't write serials tapping into the same character |
| 0:27.8 | over and over again, although she thinks that might help getting ideas sometimes. Also, how she |
| 0:34.4 | knew when to go full time, and why word count targets don't really work for her? |
| 0:39.9 | I think it would make me concentrate on the wrong things, which would be just churning out words, |
| 0:44.7 | whereas actually I think you can have had as good a day writing if you've deleted 500 words of rubbish |
| 0:52.0 | as if you've written 500 words of brilliant prose. |
| 0:56.4 | You know, one is more depressing than the other, obviously. |
| 0:59.3 | But I would say I'd probably end up writing sort of normally about a couple of thousand words a day. |
| 1:05.2 | It's all on the way with Ruth Ware in a brand new writer's routine. |
| 1:16.0 | Thank you. wear in a brand new writer's routine. Yes. |
| 1:17.1 | Welcome along to writer's routine. |
| 1:18.9 | My name's Dan Simpson. |
| 1:20.1 | Thank you for bearing with me for just a week's absence. |
| 1:23.4 | I think we should be pretty much continual right now through till Christmas. |
| 1:27.3 | All being well, fingers crossed. |
| 1:29.1 | This is the place where we take a look through an author's working day. |
| 1:32.3 | We see how they get ideas, how they plan that idea out, |
| 1:35.7 | how they plan their space and their time to give them the best chance of getting that idea out. |
| 1:41.2 | Now, this week, we're with the international bestselling author Ruth Ware. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dan Simpson, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dan Simpson and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.