How Ruth Ware Turned Her Childhood Fantasies to a Crime Thriller Empire

With rare exception, Ruth Ware has been writing a novel a year since she was 12 years old. Her first, a school assignment written over a six-week holiday break, was a dimly veiled ripoff of an Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, but Ware’s version featured a female protagonist—“a girl who lives in a fantasy world and has magical powers”—because, “I was always inserting myself into books,” the bestselling crime thriller author says. After the break when other students handed in a few pages at most, she plopped 80 handwritten pages down on her teacher’s desk. “That poor woman,” Ware says now with a laugh. “I could just see her thinking, Oh my god, what have I done?”

The first time Ware’s work featured a murder, she was even younger—just seven years old. She wrote a short story about a 70-year-old caretaker, who hears strange noises while patrolling a warehouse on Halloween and discovers witches and a dead body. (By the end, the caretaker had been turned into a frog and hopped off into a marsh.) “It was good enough that my teacher asked my mom if she had helped me write it,” Ware says. Her mom told the teacher that she had not; the story had come exclusively from her daughter’s mind.

“I’ve always had a vivid imagination,” says Ware, now in her late 40s. “If I allow myself to get carried away, I might find myself going down dark alleyways. But that’s the great pleasure of being both a reader and a writer, isn’t it? That you can pick up a book at any moment and disappear into that imaginary world. And writing is like reading on steroids—you never have to be bored. It doesn’t matter if you’re on a long train journey and you’ve forgotten your book, you can sit there and plan out the next three chapters of your novel.”

As an adult, Ware has turned her colorful fantasies into her bestselling novels—writing 10 in 10 years, which have sold over 10 million copies worldwide and been translated into 40 languages. And now, with Netflix adapting her second novel—The Woman in Cabin 10—into a film starring Keira Knightly, premiering on the platform on October 10, her imagination is coming to life in a whole new way. “It’s just so trippy being in a location that I dreamt up, hearing flesh and blood human beings saying the words I wrote in my spare bedroom 10 years ago,” Ware says of being on set. “It honestly felt like having superpowers—like I had conjured these people up and now they were real.”

“I was born a storyteller,” Ware tells me in a video interview earlier this month from her home near Brighton. “Even before I could write, I was telling my little sister these dramas with my Barbie dolls and teddy bears. They all had very individual personalities and there were these long-running sagas—it was very soap opera-esque.”

As she got older, she started writing her stories down, a trend that continued into her adulthood, years before she was published, when she’d finish novels and stuff them under her bed, never to see the light of day. “I wrote all the way through my teens, but never did anything with it,” she says. One of the novels she wrote back then was a vampire story that she calls an avatar for sexually transmitted diseases. “My character gets bitten on a night out and a few days later, realizes she’s contracted vampirism from this guy, who she then tracks down to get revenge,” she says. I remark that she could have been Twilight before Twilight, and Ware replies, “If only I’d gotten off my starting blocks earlier.”

But as a kid growing up in East Sussex on the South Coast of England (“as far south as you can get without falling into the sea,” she jokes), she had little exposure to the creative arts or publishing industry. “My parents were just regular working people,” Ware says. Her mother was a library assistant and later a stay at home mom, while her father worked as an IT manager for the town council. “It just didn’t feel like being an author was something regular people like me got to do,” she says. “It took me quite a long time to work up to the idea that you didn’t have to be someone super special to write a book—anybody could do it.”

“To be fair, I’ve got quite a vanilla life,” she continues. “Some writers out there, they were raised by wolves or used to be a police officer or something exciting. Whereas all I really have to talk about is that I always wanted to be a writer, and now I am.”

Ware studied English at Manchester University, “an incredible time” at the “tail end of the Manchester days,” she says. The legendary Hacienda nightclub was still thumping; Oasis was just on the rise. She traveled around Europe teaching English as a foreign language after graduation, and later got a job back in the UK at a children’s bookshop. “I was incredibly bad at it because all I ever did was recommend the books that I loved regardless of the age of the child,” she says. “So these five-year-olds would come in and I’d be there going to their mum, ‘Well, His Dark Materials [the fantasy trilogy by Philip Pullman] is incredible. And my boss would be there in the background saying, ‘No, stop it, just give her The Very Hungry Caterpillar.’”

A few years later, she got her first job in publishing, as a publicity assistant, pitching books for reviews and author profiles. Working in the industry she loved gave her an understanding of how it worked, the marketplace landscape, and what books sell, but it also gave her “the worst attack of stage fright.”

Keira Knightley in a scene in the Netflix adaptation of The Woman Cabin 10.

“Because when you’re in a bookshop and you see all of these books around you, it’s easy to think, Surely there has to be space on the shelves for me. They could squeeze one more in,” Ware says. “But when you’re behind the scenes at a publisher, you realize what you see in the shops is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s all these incredible books that don’t get the reception they deserve and you realize how high the bar is.”

It didn’t help that she was working with big-name writers—Booker, Nobel, and Pulitzer Prize-winning authors. “Suddenly what I’d been trying to do—writing what felt like very silly stories for my own amusement—was embarrassing by comparison,” she says. “For a while, I stopped writing. And then I carried on, but stopped thinking about being published because the idea just seemed so completely laughable. I also had the absolute horror that I would send something out to a literary agent, and they would reject it, and then I would have to work with them in a professional capacity on another title.”

It wasn’t until after Ware welcomed her second child that she had what she calls a “use-it-or-lose-it realization.” With two young children and the end of her maternity leave in sight, “I just thought, If I want to keep writing, I have to take it seriously and make it earn its keep,” she explains. “I had to try and sell a book for enough money that I could afford to cut back on work, because that’s the only way I could carry on writing.” She had an idea for a young adult novel and began to crank it out before she was due back at the office. “I knew I had this incredibly narrow window where, if I didn’t wash my hair or tidy the house, I could potentially have time to write this book,” she says.

When she let go of the pressure to author an award-winner, the words came easily. “I just wanted to write a really page-turning story that people love and can’t put down and have a good time reading,” she said. “That felt more attainable, but also much more me.”

Writing YA also felt distinct enough from her day job that it allowed her to compartmentalize. Her first YA novel, 2012’s A Witch in Winter, was a paranormal romance, with the witches harkening back to her childhood works. She wrote it using her real name Ruth Warburton (she started writing as Ruth Ware when she published her first adult novel to distinguish the works), and continued publishing similar books for the next few years until she had the idea for In a Dark, Dark Wood.

One day she was catching up over coffee with a friend, who had just attended a bachelorette party and said something to the effect of, “I’d love to read a murder mystery set at a hen party because I’ve never wanted to kill people more.” Ware says she had a feeling of, That is a book that I’d really, really, really like to write. She went to her agent and told her she wanted to write an adult crime thriller, expecting her to say, “You’re a successful YA author, don’t rock the boat.” But she didn’t; instead she said, “Write it and we’ll give it a shot.”

Knightly aboard a luxury cruise ship in The Woman in Cabin 10.

“I’ve always loved crime thrillers as a reader, so I’ve no idea why it took me so long to write them,” Ware says. “So much of being a young person is trying on different roles for size and figuring out who you are by process of elimination. For me, a big part of figuring out who I was as a writer was to try on every genre. I wrote horror, sci-fi, fantasy, historical, a lot of not very good literary fiction. I was trying on coats and thinking, This one doesn’t completely feel like me. But crime, as a genre, really did feel like coming home.”

In a Dark, Dark Wood, which, as you might have gathered, is about a bachelorette party that ends in murder, was the very first crime novel she wrote, and yet it only took her three months to complete. She had no idea if it would ever be published, so the words poured out of her freely. “I wrote it completely for myself,” she says.

Turns out, she wrote it for a lot of other people, too. In a Dark, Dark Wood was an instant No. 1 New York Times bestseller when it was published in 2015, an astounding accomplishment for a first-timer. It was first translated into Italian and German; when the French edition came around, she learned with amusement that in France, they call bachelorette parties “enterrement de la vie d’un jeune femme,” or the burial of your life as a young woman.

Reviews called her a “modern day Agatha Christie,” which Ware calls “a huge honor.” (For what it’s worth, she more so thought she was channeling Gillian Flynn and Wes Craven.) With her second novel, she says she had the choice to either pull away from the Christie comparison or lean into it, and chose the latter, writing a classic whodunit in a confined setting—a mode of transportation, no less.

Her success was very “naught to 60,” and when she sat down to write her next book, she felt pressure to prove she wasn’t a one-hit wonder. “In a Dark, Dark Wood was a complete joy to write, total fun, whereas The Woman in Cabin 10 was like drawing blood out of stone,” she says. But of course, when she finished Cabin 10—a thriller about a journalist named Lo Blacklock, who witnesses a woman being thrown overboard from a luxury cruise ship, only to be told the woman doesn’t exist—it, too, was an instant NYT bestseller.

Knightly in The Woman in Cabin 10.

Since then, Ware has published roughly a book a year. She typically begins writing each October or November and finishes somewhere between seven and nine months later. She then hands the manuscript off to her editors and enjoys a summer holiday with her husband and children, before getting back to work on edits come September. Rinse, repeat.

Her ideas are rooted in her own worries, either personal or societal. A repeating theme comes from her social anxiety. “I’m naturally quite shy, and my nightmare is being trapped at a party with people I don’t know and I am unable to get away,” she says. “That comes up again and again in my books.”

“Sometimes I now have to go, ‘Not again, Ruth. You’ve worked through that one already,’” she adds with a laugh.

In a Dark, Dark Wood came from the fear of someone ringing her up in the middle of the night to say, “That thing you said in year-whatever, it ruined my life.” (For the unfamiliar: The plot of the book centers on a woman who wakes up in a hospital unable to recall what happened at the bachelorette party.) Meanwhile, The Woman in Cabin 10 is rooted in the fear of not being believed. She says it was written in 2014-15, at a time when there were a lot of stories in the news of women “whose word was not taken at face value; whose word was instead endlessly dissected and pulled apart.”

“It seemed to me that if you were a woman, you were further down the scale in the hierarchy. If you were a young woman, you were even further down,” she continues. “And if you are a young drunk woman, you were right at the bottom in terms of whether people would believe you.”

Combine that with an article she read about how dangerous cruise ships are, and how complicated deaths in international waters can be to investigate, and you get one of the questions that was on Ware’s mind while she was writing The Woman in Cabin 10: “If you were going to murder someone, where would you do it?”

In early 2020, Ware told her publisher she wanted to take the year off for some creative refueling and to travel with her family. But then, of course, the pandemic happened. Her husband, a virologist, essentially locked himself into his office to work for two years. “He took Zoom calls on Christmas Day,” Ware recalls, “while I was the one doing all of the homeschooling and the crying into the banana bread, or whatever.”

The year was a write-off; she didn’t type a single word of a novel for 12 months. But then when things slowly started to return to normal, her ideas “bubbled over.” That’s when she wrote her longest book to-date, her seventh novel, It Girl, which was recently named one of the 25 Best Mystery Novels of the Past 25 Years by The Wall Street Journal.

Now that she’s very well-established, she plans to write a book every two years. She’s working on her 11th now, which she says “is not quite a ghost story, but has some folk horror elements.” She’s taking her time as it doesn’t come out til 2027.

Knightly in The Woman in Cabin 10.

This July, she published her tenth novel, The Woman in Suite 11, her first sequel, a followup to The Woman in Cabin 10, that again features Lo Blacklock in a luxury setting—this time, a Swiss hotel owned by a billionaire—where she encounters a woman from her past who needs her help, setting off a chase across the continent.

Ware says she’d never planned to write a sequel unless she had a “banging idea” for one. But Blacklock was the character she got the most questions about from readers. “All of those questions over the years kept me thinking about her in the way that you have a friend who you haven’t seen in a while and then their name pops up on Facebook and you’re like, ‘Oh, I wonder how she’s doing?’” she says. She kept thinking about Lo, and all of the characters on the ship, and then the banging idea came.

Though it is an unplanned coincidence, the sequel’s release is well-timed with the premiere of the The Woman in Cabin 10 film adaptation following on Netflix just a few months later. She was halfway through writing The Woman in Suite 11 when she learned the film, which had been optioned years prior, was moving ahead. “It was an incredible gift, and also made my task more complicated,” she says. In addition to writing a sequel that would satisfy those who had read the first, while including enough background for new readers, she then also had to write a book that would make sense to the Netflix audience. “At which point I had a minor nervous breakdown and had to go wrestle with it,” Ware says.

She wasn’t involved in writing the script and naturally there were some changes in the process of turning a 100,000-word book into a 90-minute movie, but she says she was completely on board with filmmaker Simon Stone’s vision. “I was very happy to say, ‘Go and make this as good as you possibly can,” she says. “It’s like waving your baby off to Kindergarten. ... But the cast and team behind it was incredible and I did feel my baby was in good hands. And thank goodness, it was—the heart of the book is very much in the film and all the reasons I wanted to write it are there.”

Ware (right) on set of The Woman in Cabin 10 in Portland Harbour, England, with Cassidy Lange, director of Original Film at Netflix.

Knightly plays Blacklock in the film. And though Ware says she’s “a ton more beautiful than I’d imagined Lo,” she masters the character’s tough vulnerability: “Lo is quite a fragile-seeming person, but at the core of that is a real steel, strength, and purpose, and Keira nailed that.”

Now that she’s a bestseller many times over and has a film on the way, along with several other adaptations in development, I ask Ware about her remaining goals for her career. She tells me she’s already “ticked pretty much every single box I could have dared to hope for when I was a little baby author.” So her dream now is to keep doing what she’s doing, for as long as she possibly can. “I would love to be one of those grand dame old lady writers sitting in my library and carrying on for 50 books like Agatha Christie,” she says. “Who wouldn’t want that?”

At the end of our conversation, I ask Ware to choose her favorite of her books (after telling her mine is The Turn of the Key). At first she resists, saying it’s like being asked to choose a favorite child. But then she selects In a Dark, Dark Wood, because it’s the novel that changed her career, and life, forever. The book that taught her the value of sharing her vivid imagination with the world; the one that allowed her to quit her job and start the career she was destined for; and that proved to her that ordinary people just like her can be authors, too.

Or, she adds, perhaps her favorite book is whatever one she’s writing at the moment. “Because that is the one that still has every possibility,” she says. “It could be anything it wants to be, and that’s incredibly exciting.”