I have come to realize perfection is overrated. If the world became filled with beautiful people who never did anything wrong, managed their daily lives efficiently without stress and still managed to get everything done, how boring would that be?
Actually, I think I would hate every one of those people. The nerve of them being so perfect when the rest of us are scrambling.
Maybe that’s why I like when people screw up. Well, not so much the screwing up, but the part that comes immediately after. That’s when the good stuff happens. It’s sort of like peeking behind the curtain into their character. Will that person become humbled? Will they feverishly try to correct their mistake? Will they apologize?
For me, the person’s reaction to the mistake makes them interesting.
As a reader, I gravitate to flawed characters. I like to imagine what event in the character’s history made them that way. What emotional wound do they have that hasn’t been healed over the years? What makes them act the way they do or fear the things they fear?
As a child, I slept with a blanket. One night my father told me I had to try sleeping without it. Imagine what that felt like to a kid who’d been sleeping with her blanket every night for as long as she could remember. I begged for my blanket. When he refused, I curled into a ball and cried because the fear of sleeping without that swatch of cloth paralyzed me. I did eventually fall asleep, but I vividly remember that feeling. Not pleasant.
At the time, I was too young to understand the importance of sleeping through the night without my blanket. As an adult, I realize it was my first life lesson on conquering my fears. That lesson became one of the many gifts my father (in his odd ways!) gave me. He taught me to try new things and, as terrifying as it sometimes is, part of me likes the rush of tackling my fears.
I think that’s why I like to write flawed characters. Call me evil, but I try to shove a character face first into their deepest fears. I want them to experience the pain of facing that fear. And the joy of conquering it.
In my second release, A JUST DECEPTION, the hero, Peter, wants the heroine, Izzy, who is undoubtedly my most damaged character, to face her intimacy problems. But she is not about to open her scarred, long-buried wounds. One of my favorite lines is when Izzy tells Peter how terrified she is of getting emotionally attached and he says, “I think you want to be terrified.”
It makes me wonder if we all don’t want to be a bit terrified on some level. To release ourselves from our fears. To let our flawed selves dig deep and reveal those wounds.
That, for me, is what makes a person truly fascinating.
Readers, what do you think? Is perfection overrated?
Adrienne Giordano writes romantic suspense and women’s fiction. She is a Jersey girl at heart, but now lives in the Midwest with her work-a-holic husband, sports obsessed son and Buddy the Wheaten Terrorist (Terrier). She is a co-founder of Romance University blog. For more information on Adrienne’s books please visit www.AdrienneGiordano.com. Adrienne can also be found on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/AdrienneGiordanoAuthor and Twitter at http://twitter.com/AdriennGiordano.
 MAN LAW |
 A JUST DECEPTION |
 RISKING TRUST |
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