Sick of Myself

By Michael Harling

About a year ago, I finished my novel. (Hold your applause.) It wasn't the first novel I ever attempted, or the first I finished, but it remains the only one I ever wrote from a first-person point of view. And as a woman.

Despite one agent advising I should give up pretending to be female, I found the experience strangely liberating. Let's leave the question of why my stories always seem to include strong female characters with my therapist for now, and concentrate on the point of view. The immediacy, the intimacy, the knowing where I was and who I was at all times really helped the story unfold and kept me on track where some of my other efforts had gone astray. But there was a down-side.

During the better part of the two years I inhabited the head of a fetching twenty-something, I continued to write personal essays and post chronicles to my website; in short, a lot of personal pronouns hit the pages during those months. So by the time I finished writing-- and revising and revising and revising-- and began casting about for my next project, I found, to my great and continuing surprise, that I was sick of writing about myself. (You may argue that my novel's first-person narrator doesn't count, but let's be honest, it was simply me in a dress, though we'll leave that with my therapist, as well.)

At any rate, I was determined my next book would contain lines like "Louie felt the cold stamp of a .38 muzzle against the back of his neck. 'I hate Mondays,' he thought." instead of "I sifted through my wardrobe for over an hour, but still couldn't decide what to wear."  Fortunately, my muse had dry-gulched a few workable ideas some time ago, and currently had them bound and gagged with duct tape and locked in her closet, waiting for the right time to let them out. (Hey, you get your ideas where you can and you hang on to them.)

One was a light adventure about a young (yawn) woman who decides she wants to be a superhero (this is entirely plausible, really) and the other was a straightforward mystery about a man who remembers seeing a murder that happened before he was born. I could only envision Ms. Superhero in first person, so I stuffed her back in the closet and pulled out murder-mystery man.

He had it all: mystery, suspense, treachery, violence, and, most of all, a decidedly aloof and distant voice. So I took this kernel of an idea and began to play with it. What would happen? Where would it lead? What would he do?

Well, for one thing, there might be cops involved, and someone would be saddled with solving a 30-year old murder. A rookie maybe. Probably a woman. What turns would the investigation take? Was she being set up to fail by her misogynistic superior? How would she cope?

You get the picture. Before long my macho mystery man was fading into the background and my rookie cop, with an increasingly self-centered point of view, starting creeping into the spotlight. As snippets of prose began congealing in my head, they began sounding less and less like, "He smashed at the door with his crowbar and peered through the jagged hole. The body was on the floor, laid out as if for a funeral. Then he felt the cold stamp of a .38 muzzle against the back of his neck," and more like, "It was my first murder case, and I couldn't decide what to wear."

After several months of trying to wrestle her back into the wings, I found myself with such a convoluted, confused, and recalcitrant plot that my muse declared she couldn't work with me any more and stomped off in a strop.

Now all I have left is Superhero Girl (I've checked the closet; I can hear her muffled protests emanating from the darkness, but aside from that, it's empty), so I guess there's nothing else for it but to get the dress out again and see if it still fits.


Despite his assertions, Michael Harling is obviously not tired of talking about himself, either in first person, or third person. He has published personal essays-- liberally peppered with the pronoun "I"-- in the Albany Times Union, Absolute Write, and By-Line Magazine. Read more of his first person ramblings at www.Lindenwald.com.