Sometimes We Bounce by Dean Gloster

             If you’ve stumbled around enough in this sharp-edged world with an uneven skill set, you have the bruises to show that you’re a flawed character.

 

            (Unless you’re a narcissistic sociopath. Then you’re definitely a flawed character, but you fight the diagnosis and always get defensive when it’s pointed out.)

             I write stories with flawed characters, because I write stories about humans. Like most, I’m a flawed character who was raised by deeply flawed characters. 

            In turn I’ve helped raise two children. Raising a child gets you in touch with your inner flawed self faster than anything: You don’t want to make the same mistakes your parents did, so you make a different set.

            Yet those children still turned out amazing.

            That’s another reason to write about flawed characters. It’s not just that flawed characters are realistic and relatable: A flawed character, at the beginning of a story, is the hope for extraordinary change: a promise that things, even deeply engraved things, can change and be rewritten for the better.

            That’s the internal character journey in fiction: Starting with a flaw or a wrong idea (adopted for good reason) the protagonist encounters difficulty after difficulty and finally must change to triumph or persist at the end. Change is hard, and we humans don’t do it lightly. We only give up wrong ideas or limiting defense mechanisms when continuing to live with them creates way more problems in life than the truths they protect us from.

            And, of course, flawed that we are, sometimes we don’t change. When I was a teen, my smart, troubled mother was enthusiastically drinking herself to death, a process she finished when I was twenty. I wrote about it here.

            In Al-Anon, they talk about alcoholics “hitting bottom” and how when some addicts do that, they change. Others don’t. They don’t bounce; they just dig a new sub-basement.

            But I like to believe in, and write about, the bounce.

            Today is my birthday. It’s not a speed-limit birthday, but at this point there are almost enough candles on the cake to set off a sprinkler system.

            As an early birthday present, I found out this week that next year I may be co-editing an anthology of stories and poems for the wonderful folks at Autonomous Press, tentatively on the subject “Bounce.” More details to follow in the months ahead.

            I’m especially glad today that, flawed as I am, I’m still bouncing around.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now deals with opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) He makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social