Your memoir is not a journal or a personal history. Your memoir is a story, complete with a narrative arc, characters, and a central conflict. You are writing your memoir for a reader, and that story needs to be crafted with intention and focus. Deleting content from your memoir isn’t personal—it’s writing.

So, let’s get down to business. You need one tool to help you know what stays in your memoir and what goes. I call it your thesis.

Editing, potty training, business coaching, nutrition consulting, personal training, personal styling—they’re not all that different from each other. Editing is a service that teaches you what you don’t know, or frames what you do know into a perspective that actually helps you. Editing is a service that not only improves your writing, it gives you a partner and a support for when you’re ready to quit and delete and never come back to that manuscript ever again. Hiring an editor is that writing lifeline that can be the difference between giving up and publishing your book.

Finding the right editor might feel similar. You might not be at the mental low point people seeking therapy often are, but you likely don’t know how to find an editor, what the process will look like, and how to know you’ve found the right one. And when you find that right editor? Magic.

Getting published isn’t the point. I know, I know. The internet holds innumerable spaces for writers wanting to get published. It’s the dream, right? The goal, the end-all be-all of writing—right? The publishing industry itself is a complex network of gatekeepers that you think you have to impress to be a “real” writer. Seeing your book on the shelves of Barnes & Noble is a dream that fills you with excitement. And that’s okay—you should feel excited when you think of holding a real, bound book with your name on the cover. But that’s not why you should write it.

And I think it’s so funny that writers feel like they need to ask permission to write their story the way they want to write it, because here’s the thing: You can do whatever the hell you want with your memoir. This is your story, and you can write it the way you want to. Are there memoir conventions? Sure. Are they finite and unrelenting? Nope.

If you want to expand how you see the memoir genre (and how you might go about writing your own), scroll through these subgenres to get an idea of what’s possible for you.