I’ve always wanted to write books, especially those involving crime and mystery. But I long-ago realized that I needed to write a memoir first.

Ever since I was a girl, I envisioned myself a mystery or crime writer, since I immersed myself in reading Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes. I’m still a fan of the genres, being a huge fan of shows such as NCIS, Criminal Minds, and Castle. But I also realized that I needed to write a memoir before I could move on to fiction.

Much as Alice Sebold had to temporarily put her novel The Lovely Bones in a drawer until she wrote Lucky, her memoir about her own rape and the resulting trial, I felt that if I didn’t write the book about my mother’s disappearance and the resulting fallout, bits of it would appear in everything I wrote.

Let’s clear something up first. Many people say I’m too young (thank you) to write a memoir. But a memoir is a story from your life, not a story of your life. You can write many memoirs, as Mary Karr has successfully done. An autobiography, on the other hand, is the story of your life from birth to the present, and is usually a one-and-done phenomenon.

Way back in 2006, a friend of mine, Veronica, knew I was interested in writing a memoir. She called me on a cold, cloudy January day in Chicago and told me about a memoir writing workshop being held the next month in Guatemala. Joyce Maynard was hosting the workshop. She is well-known for her memoir At Home in the World, as well as many other works of narrative non-fiction and fiction. I grabbed one of the last spots and bought my ticket for Guatemala.

Attending writers were required to submit 25 pages of their work-in-progress to Joyce and the other attendees so that everyone could critique the work and share their feedback. When I paid for the workshop, I hadn’t written a word. That evening I finally sat at my keyboard and started typing. I wrote only five pages in that first sitting, but my tears that night were ones of elated excitement and forlorn fear. I knew I had a story to tell, but I worried that I wouldn’t do it justice. Those feelings would follow me for the next decade, as I worked on the project, more off than on, for the next fifteen years.

In future posts, I’ll share some of my struggles, how I overcame them, as well as the feeling that day I could finally say my first draft was complete.