"Write as if everyone you know is dead."
For many, I think that the idea of writing as though everyone you know was dead would be a very hard thing to do. The main reason that this would be so hard is that simply, hopefully, not everyone you know is actually dead and they may actually end up reading whatever you wrote. One of the prime examples, from McCurdy's memoir, of writing as though someone were dead, was with her father who was almost entirely nonexistent throughout her childhood. This is extremely apparent as the father is mentioned in her memoir only a handful of times and when he is mentioned it is always in an uncomfortable situation where he is the background character. While reading you notice that the father is still alive to read about how Jennette viewed him while sharing that view not only to the world but also to the father himself. This is where the difficulty in writing about people's flaws comes into play as the writer is battling with the conscience that there is, in fact, a chance that so