Annie Ward

Annie Ward has a BA in English Literature from UCLA and a MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. Her first short screenplay, Strange Habit, starring Adam Scott was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Jury Award winner at the Aspen Film Festival. She has received a Fulbright Scholarship and An Escape to Create Artists residency. She lives in Kansas with her family.

Ward's new novel is Beautiful Bad.

From her Q&A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: How did you come up with the idea for Beautiful Bad, and for your characters Madeline and Ian?

A: It was a long process, sometimes painful. I didn’t come up with the idea for Beautiful Bad--in the form in which it exists today—-until I’d completed several drafts of a very different book.

The original manuscript that I set out to write was a memoir called The British Bodyguard. It was heavily focused on my husband’s experiences working in close protection in the British army. Spending 16 years in places like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Iraq can take quite a toll on a person and I didn’t shy away from depicting the difficulties that came along with being married to a former soldier.

It was pretty raw and candid. My agent suggested I fictionalize it. I didn’t like that idea at the time. I was very personally invested in the memoir. It was heart-breaking but I abandoned the project.

It wasn’t until a few years later that my husband and I were talking about it and he joked, “The problem with the memoir was that everyone was waiting to see which of one of us was going to kill the other first.” It was at that moment that I finally had the idea to turn Beautiful Bad into the dark, domestic drama that eventually hit the shelves.

Maddie and Ian evolved out of characters that were based on me and my husband. I threw in a lot of lies, deceit, and madness and the result was a psychological thriller with...[read on]

Visit Annie Ward's website.

The Page 69 Test: Beautiful Bad.

--Marshal Zeringue