When I originally started write meg!, I had very random concepts of what the blog would be. I’ve always been a writer and figured if I were going to chronicle my daily adventures in some way, I’d have to include my writing life in there. At the time, I was only a year out of college and still wistfully planning on scripting a few poems and getting myself into some sort of major poetry magazine.

Until, you know, I completely lost interest in that. I remember walking out of class with my good friend Erin, both of us chatting about the prose we’d whipped up over the weekend. We had so many stories to share about . . . everything. Living. Loving. And everything came easily — those lines I’d rip out of some corner of myself and tap out on my laptop, printing out my most recent poem for critique in class the following week.

I don’t know if that’s part of my problem — I’d gotten so used to writing on a deadline that the idea of just working on a project, long term, lost its appeal. Poetry was my preferred medium — succinct, powerful. I loved cramming so much into a tiny space, challenging myself to see if I could manage to convey something real in less than 20 lines. I’d spent all of my high school years writing poetry in massive documents in Word (I never write long-hand anymore, except in my personal journals) for the sheer love of it, and I spent my college years writing poetry in massive Word documents because . . . I was getting “graded” on it.

Though I’m proud of many of my poems and have even seen them published in regional magazines, I realized with a jolt that for as much as I loved reading novels, writing novels had to be my true calling. And when I discovered National Novel Writing Month with a few of my coworkers at the newspaper where I’d become an editor, it was abundantly clear that fiction was where I needed to be. (In fact, my second post ever was about NaNo — and this same subject.)

So it was all clear — I was a writer, and I was a writer of fiction. In the span of two years, I’ve completed three novels topping a total of 900+ double-spaced pages. I’ve sent out countless query letters, many of which received unintentionally hilarious responses. Of the three books, all have featured strong, assertive but ultimately vulnerable twenty-something women trying to, you know, figure out who they are and ultimately leave behind a louse of an ex-boyfriend — and everything about him that dragged her down.

They were all told in first-person. All three took place in Washington, D.C., or its suburbs. Each heroine had dark, shoulder-length curly dark hair, dark eyes and a biting wit she had no trouble unleashing upon whoever happened to be closest. Each of them had an ex in the picture that they couldn’t quite get over, even though years had passed. Two of the three had an obsession with all things British — and one of the three even made a pilgrimmage to London.

Sounding familiar?

Yes — they were me. All of them. Completely and entirely me, me, me. Did I realize this while I was writing each of the aforementioned novels? No, I can honestly say I didn’t. In fact, at one time I would have fought with you for suggesting that my main characters were just me talking in a variety of situations.

I know that “writing what you know” is old writing advice, but I don’t think that anyone meant it quite so literally — outside of the world of memoirs, anyway. And hey, I’m great, but that doesn’t mean I want to write and read about me all the time. And since I’m not trying out new voices and narrative styles through my poetry anymore, I’m now doing something really daring, something totally different, something shocking . . .

I’m writing in third person.

My heroine is no longer me.

She’s in her twenties, sure, and maybe she has a lousy ex still hanging around the picture’s periphery (don’t we all?). She’s gone through some things and come out the other side of it, even if it doesn’t always feel that way (again, nothing new). But just the idea of writing from a totally different perspective has made me feel completely energized, as has reading Jill Mansell’s Millie’s Fling, which I’m about halfway through now! Mansell does a superb job of writing from an outside perspective but still keeping everything personable, interesting and compelling.

So here’s to trying something different . . . and quitting my literary narcissism! Let’s hope the fourth book is the best yet.