Unfortunately, not everything that’s happened in my life is worth writing about. The first step for me, therefore, in writing a personal essay, is to select an exciting event that others will want to read. Violence is good. Heartbreak is also good. Happiness, while fun to experience, is uninteresting to most everyone else. For example, my mother buying me a kitten when I was seven years old does not make a compelling story. My mother killing my cat three years later, does.

And once I have decided upon this incident — my mother killing my cat — I’m ready to begin. It will even be helpful to launch the essay with the unambiguous statement, “This is an essay about my mother killing my cat.” Yes, I am beginning with the ending, but a statement like that will draw the reader in. Who, but the most jaded among us, could look away with disinterest from such an opening line?

The problem, however, is that the opening line is not entirely accurate. My mother did not literally kill my cat with her bare hands. What she did one afternoon, in a burst of rage, was to take my cat to the pound. I went along. It was the same pound we had adopted him from three years earlier. (This might be irony.) In effect, my cat’s fate was placed into the hands of strangers. So, I will use my dramatic opening line to entrap the reader, and once entrapped I will allow the story to unfold, until the reader has been brought along to my way of thinking: My mother killed my cat.

But no good story is without some sort of twist. And since I have given away the ending, will there be anything left that will still “surprise” the reader? Well, perhaps the story of my cat is really a story about loneliness, revenge, and a lost childhood — mine and my mother’s. She had often talked about how her own cat was taken away to an uncertain fate when she was a little girl. “I saw him playing in the field today,” her family would continue to lie to her months after. And forty years later, my mother’s fury and pain was still palpable —but at least now she was the one able to take matters into her own hands.

When I’m done writing my essay, I will go back over it to make it sound as natural, as clean, as unrepetitive as possible. How often have I used the word “fate”? I will admire the finished product. But soon after, I will once again begin to wonder if there’s anything left in my life worth writing about.

This piece originally appeared on Biographile.