Both. The thought of writing wears me down and compels procrastination. But when I finally discipline myself to start writing, adrenaline begins to flow, slow at first, but picking up as I make progress. There are also days when the blank page stays blank, and I give up. But not for long. The lure of creativity adrenaline will eventually drive me back to the keyboard.

Probably the most common trap is the desire to believe that readers inherently care about our life experiences. Memoir writers are often also memoir readers, and because, as readers, they actually did come to care about the experiences of others through reading memoir, they may fool themselves into imagining that their interest wasn’t earned through the craft of storytelling. Memoir is a true story, but it is still a story. Stories are crafted carefully through the art of language, theme, symbolism, and, perhaps most critically, structure. A great memoir includes true experiences that have been shaped and carved into a story that is desirable to read. Readers will care about the memoirist, but only after the writer has earned their interest.

My father used to like to tell this anecdote about me as a child. I learned words young and began to speak early. Soon after, I started to tailor my word choices depending on which parent I wanted something from. Specifically, my father called our refrigerator the “ fridge,” and my mother called it our “icebox.” When I wanted something inside, I named it by the preferred word of the parent most likely to grant my wish. My dad loved telling that story. He was proud of his young child’s growing vocabulary. I know now that the skill I was developing had more to do with power than words, and that the latter could serve the former.

The loss of virginity scene. Still, even after all these years, I feel embarrassed about sex before marriage, ashamed that I didn’t have better self-control. And when I wasn’t wrestling with shaming baggage from my long past, I struggled with new shame-related fears about creating self-indulgent melodrama over something as ordinary as sex. The conditioning that we receive about human sexuality casts a large shadow on the subject, and that shadow follows me right into publication as well. It wasn’t just the most difficult scene to write; it is also the most vulnerable scene to share. And how silly is that, given that most every person on the planet has shared this experience?

Without a doubt, a bear. Lumbering, nosing around, insatiably curious, solitary, taking long breaks and naps— sometimes an entire winter long. Hungry. Always hungry, even when well fed. And ferocious, but only when absolutely required to protect self or offspring. Otherwise, fairly content with peaceful solitude.

The real people are the characters in memoir, and I owe them everything. Were it not for real people, I’d have no story. I also owe every single person I described or named deep appreciation for permitting me to paint them by the light of my perspective at the time. Not only am I certain that my perspective was immature; I am also well aware that any perspective is undoubtedly an incomplete picture, limited by ignorance and bias. Although I attempted to provide a rounded view of people, I’m sure it was still ultimately a simplified one.

This is a complex moral question. Honesty is a virtue, but it also sometimes stings and can be impolite at best and manipulative at worst. The person at the keyboard holds the power of what to share and what to withhold, and good storytelling requires intentional expansion and reduction, to some degree. Is it ethical to be truthful from your own perspective even if that view is limited? On the other hand, is it ethical to suppress voices that don’t align with your perspective? Certainly it is disrespectful to write about people, capturing only the flaws. But how respectful is it to write about people, capturing only their best qualities? Writing ethically about people, real people, involves doing our best to provide a 360 degree view. Only by circling the entire person from every angle do we come close to capturing the realness of that person, which of course lies inside, out of our physical view.