A Conversation With Amy Bloom on the Inner Life of Characters (Killer Writers)

In this conversation, New York Times bestselling author Amy Bloom explores what it means to truly understand the people we write about. Drawing on her background as a psychotherapist and her work in fiction and memoir, Amy discusses observation without judgment, the power of restraint, and the emotional complexity that defines real human behavior. From writing about love without sentimentality to portraying flawed characters with compassion, she offers a clear, candid look at how writers can move beyond easy answers and into the deeper, often contradictory truths that make characters feel fully alive on the page.

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“Amy, you trained as a therapist before becoming well-known as a writer. When you sit down to create a character, do you find yourself listening to them the way a therapist listens to a patient, paying attention not only to what they say but also to what they avoid revealing?”

“On the one hand, probably, because I’ve been a therapist for a terribly long time. I listen to a lot of people, probably in and out of my office, but I don’t feel like there’s much overlap between the therapy and the writing. Except, I got such good training, because this was such a long time ago, that I used to have to write a transcript for my supervisor from the moment the client walked into the office until they left, without using a tape recorder, from memory. After each session, I had to make all the notes.”

“In dialogue, I would imagine.”

“It was great training for listening and understanding transitions, and, exactly as you say, for identifying what didn’t get mentioned that somehow led to the next thing. As a writer, and I guess as a person, I am always interested in the gaps. I always say that my place as a writer is between the sidewalk and the road, that weird intersection around the curb where something is underneath. That’s always what interests me.”

“Writers are always told to observe people, and so, thinking of you as a therapist, I imagine you observing people. But that advice always seems a bit vague. Based on your experience, what does genuine observation look like to you when you’re trying to understand the motivation behind behavior?”

“I’m not sure you ever need to tell a good writer, ‘observe,’ because I think that’s what turns people into writers, the fact that they’re already little weirdos in the corner, observing people. Now it turns out you can do something with those observations. I think it’s noticing what people do, what they avoid, where they pause, where they push forward, and being willing to see them not just from my own stance. It’s no good if it’s my point of view, looking at them, judging them, and going, oh, I wouldn’t choose that. That’s not an observation; that’s a judgment. And those things are not the same. It’s how I feel about the bad guys when I’m writing, which is that no villain thinks they are a villain. Villains think they are misunderstood, mistreated, and really quite brave. Villains think all sorts of things about themselves, which is not how we see them, but to me, part of observing is being willing not just to see them through my lens. When I’m writing, I want to see it through the character’s lens.”

“Love is one of the most written-about topics in fiction, but it’s also one of the easiest to make overly saccharine. When writing about love, how do you recommend writers stay honest without slipping into sentimentality or clichés?”

“I think there has to be a willingness in the writer to feel, rather than a desire to evoke something. It’s not about how you present to the reader; it’s about what you’re trying to do with these characters. What matters to you? Not just how you want to make somebody else feel, nor how you, as the writer, wish to be seen. My goal is to make the characters come alive, not to create interest in me. I’m way back there. What I want to give readers is interesting, complicated people who can’t get out of their own bloody way, which, to me, is most human beings. We know we’re impulsive, and we mean to give it some thought, but boy, there we go, charging straight ahead. Or we know that’s the wrong thing to say; you shouldn’t get pissed off at people who have more authority over you than you would like, but there you go, opening your big mouth. And so, I think it’s the same with love, which is more interesting to me than romance. I don’t mind romance, but I’m a grown person. I’m not that interested in romance. I am always interested in love, because it comes in so many varieties.”

“That’s a great distinction.”

“I think romance leads to clichés and terrible ideas, like the giant box of candy. ‘No thank you,’ said every woman, everywhere, forever. And yet, there they are. I think I’m more interested in connections, including failed ones. Love that is unrequited is still love. It’s just not pretty. Love that gets you in trouble is still love, even though it’s a terrible idea.”

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“You’ve definitely made connections in this book, some failing, some succeeding, and found connections where the characters weren’t expecting them. Do you listen to your characters a lot while you write?”

“I do. Years ago, Alice Walker said that when she was working on a novel, the characters would come and sit at the end of the bed and tell their stories, and I always thought, oh, that sounds great, and so convenient. In my house, if somebody comes and sits on the end of your bed, it’s not a literary character, it’s someone going, ‘Where’s the Pepto-Bismol?’ So I always thought that would be wonderful, but it is true that I can’t write without hearing them. Otherwise, you dress it up, you put the bonnet on it, you put on the frilly stocks, but it is still dead until they speak. I have to hear them, and then I can usually see them. But the big thing is being able to hear their inflection, cadence, and the roots of their speech. I’m very aware that the roots of my speech are Long Island by way of the Bronx, by way of a lesser, small, terrible town in Russia. And you can hear that in my speech. And so I’m really interested in people’s obvious accents, but also their hidden accents, their markers, what they’re comfortable with, what people are showing you, and what they're concealing.”

“You use restraint in this book. Have you noticed that restraint, sometimes holding back the emotions as you do here, can make a love story more powerful than saying something outright?”

“I think so. When, in a story, you have something that is not said but is seen, I think that has a lot of impact. I think you have to be willing to trust that the reader got the message. You don’t actually have to say it three times. If you said it right the one time, you probably don’t have to say it three more times. I like the pressure of restraint. I always feel like it’s the weeds trying to come up through the sidewalk. I’m interested in the sidewalk and the weeds. What is that pressure? What makes something separate and open up? What is unyielding? All those things are really interesting to me.”

“Many of your characters make difficult, or sometimes even questionable, choices, not necessarily ones that make readers happy, but they make the organic choices they probably need to make, and you don’t judge them on the page. How do you allow a character to be flawed without stepping in as some sort of moral referee?”

“I don’t think it’s my nature. There’s a really charming moment in Ted Lasso. He’s proving some moral point or another, but what he basically says is, 'I’m like Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman said, "Be curious, not judgmental."' I am endlessly curious. I don’t need to make a judgment about my characters. I can’t help being a crappy human being. When I see people out in the world, and I see somebody say ‘thank you’ to somebody else, and the other person says, ‘No problem,’ there’s a part of me, in my mother’s voice, going, ‘I think the phrase you’re looking for is, you’re welcome.’ I make judgments, but for my characters, my job is to illuminate. I want my readers to be able to see somebody in all the flaws, all the cracks, all the light, and decide. I certainly have lots of readers who have said to me, 'Oh, I hated this character. She was awful, she wasn’t nice enough, she wasn’t good enough,’ and that is fine with me, but that’s not my job. My job is to bring them to life for the reader, and whatever the reader wants to do with them is okay with me.”

“What’s the trick for writing about someone whose choices you personally disagree with? Writers I speak with feel uncomfortable about presenting opposing points of view because they’re worried about how they’re going to be received.”

“Some of that is a completely understandable worry on the part of the writer, that somehow these unpleasant points of view will be attributed to the writer and people will think badly of you. I feel like this is a big, interesting, variegated world. My experience is that good people do bad things. Bad people occasionally surprise us by doing good things. Stupid people can have great moments of astute observation. Really smart people can’t get out of their own damn way. I don’t mind the idea that a character I have real affection for makes a really terrible choice, because that seems to me the way people are. I’m rooting for them. Mostly. I don’t think you can write a good character that you despise. I think you have to be on their side in some way. There has to be some connection with them, even if it’s just your bad self.”

“I was going to say that even if you see yourself as the villain sees himself.”

“I am deeply sympathetic to the impulsive character who should think more, because I’ve been working on managing my impulsivity for 50 years. I think that, as the writer, you have to be willing to remember those feelings. Everybody has feelings of envy, longing, anger, sadism. Everybody does. Instead of dumping it on the villain, it seems to me that, as the writer, you have to be willing to say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember when I was not wishing for the best for that outcome.’”

“Two very strong black lines that are very thin here, with a lot of gray in the middle.”

“I don’t mind gray. Part of what makes gray interesting is that it’s such a great backdrop for big, bold things.”

“Continuing on what you’re talking about here, maybe compassion. When you’re creating a difficult character, where does compassion come into play?”

“I think one feels compassion if you can see them as a person. If you see them as villains, there’s no compassion. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real villains in the world, but there’s a moment in Blunt Instrument where this very unlikable, handsome, difficult, odd, arrogant guy is making a play for the detective.”

“I love his hair, by the way.”

“What must it have been like to be him, off at college? Fresh from the farm, being condescended to, and able to feel it the way he did. All that compassion means is that you have the capacity to feel the way the other person felt. That sort of goes with being a person. I’m always interested in what’s on the inside. What’s the backstory?”

“You’re advocating that we understand every character.”

“I don’t know how you write a fully dimensional character if you don’t understand them. You can’t block them off, you can’t be like, well, they are like that, and that has nothing to do with me. That’s a cardboard character. That’s not a three-dimensional human being, and three-dimensional human beings tend to be what I’m interested in. One of the things I liked as I was working on Blunt Instrument is that there’s a point at which Dell is being herself and jumping to conclusions, and I think it’s Mary Clarke, a professor who’s ill, who sort of says to her, ‘You have no idea. You grew up like this. You don’t have any idea what it’s like to be that man.’ To me, Mary Clarke in the novel is sort of one of the good angels. She always tells the truth, and I think she’s rarely wrong. I feel like that’s part of what you want as a writer. You want to be able to see your characters and feel them from the inside, from who they are, not just in judgment. I understand judgment is tidy. It makes things simple. Good people over here, bad people over there, but that tends not to be how I see it.”

“I don’t think that’s how the world operates, either.”

“Many of your stories center on families that defy the traditional mold. What draws you to unconventional relationships?”

“As you said at the beginning, I’m quite interested in love, and I think it takes many forms. I’m interested in friendship; I’m interested in parents and children. And my experience is that there’s something wonderful about blood ties. My parents have passed, but I was close to them. My big sister is alive; we’re very close. My children, thank God, are all fine. And there are other relationships, too. I’ve had someone as my best friend since we were three years old. Our mothers had been best friends since they were in the third grade. It’s not so much about unconventional families, although I understand it can look that way. It’s that these connections take so many different forms. I wouldn’t want to leave out those without blood ties, as if they were unimportant. I think that love and the lack of love pretty much shape people’s lives. If it comes from your own mother, it is wonderful, and if it doesn’t come from your own mother, that’s a difficult challenge. But if there is somebody else, a wonderful teacher, a priest who really cared about you when you were playing basketball at nine years old, all of those relationships make people who they are. I don’t think of them as unconventional families; I just think of them as part of the human range.”

“Have you noticed that, in life and in characters, people often reveal themselves much more clearly through the people they choose to surround themselves with?”

“That’s one of the real gifts you get as a writer, which is that once you give your character friends and people they connect to, you begin to see them in all their moving parts. It’s like if anybody’s going home this weekend in April for Passover or Easter, you know how it is. You’re going to walk through the door, and everybody’s going to regress. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated and grown-up you are. Cousin so-and-so is going to say the exact thing that’s going to press your buttons, and you’re going to end up making your little sister cry. That’s because people are really interesting, and the past just comes along with us. I think it’s often revealed, exactly as you say, in who you surround yourself with, what makes you feel better, or what you’ve abandoned. There’s this great line from Faulkner who says, ‘I don’t know why folks say the past is dead. Hell, it ain’t even past.’ I think that tends to shape people’s relationships, too.”

“As a therapist, if there’s one thing you’ve learned from writing so many complex characters, what do you think writing has taught you about human nature?”

“I don’t know if it’s taught me anything about human nature. It certainly taught me something about myself.”

“That’s even more interesting than what I asked about.”

“I am not, by nature, a patient person. I wasn’t born patient.”

“I wish you’d told me that before we began the interview.”

“Writing has helped me become a more patient person because I’m not a fast writer. It takes time, and if I’m going to spend the day on a sentence, well, by God, I’m going to have to spend the day on a sentence, and that’s how it is sometimes. Changing a word changes the sentence, which changes the paragraph, which changes the page. Being not only willing to do that but, I think, at this point in my life, grateful for the chance to make it better has made me more patient. I think writing has always been, for me, a useful way to sort out how I’m seeing something. It’s still true. If I really want to know what I’m thinking, I write it down.”

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Amy Bloom is the New York Times bestselling author of novels, short stories, memoir, and nonfiction. Blunt Instrument is her first crime novel. Amy resides in Connecticut and recently retired as Wesleyan University’s Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing, while continuing to work as a psychotherapist and a novelist. https://www.amybloom.com/