Ever Freeze Up When Trying to Write?

One of my kids gifted me one of those memory books for Christmas, which I'd never heard of before, but I'm not necessarily looped into things like that. The process is, questions are emailed to me on a schedule of my choosing, and I respond with up to a 500-word response. I was excited at first---the project sounded fun, and who doesn't like sharing memories? When I pulled up the site, I found that some of the questions were interesting, but the majority of them were unanswerable. Well, they're answerable, but not in an interesting way. I suppose that all depends on the person. However, one is able to substitute different questions for the ones they don't want to bother with and to also compose their own, more suitable questions. I did a lot of changing up, although most of the offerings were kind of blah.

I received my first question yesterday, and I'm already frozen. It's one thing to have a book on my shelf that's sort of cringey; at least that would be for my eyes only, and nobody could force me to read it. But I'm assuming my kid, and likely his brother, will be ordering a copy of the book for themselves (if it's ever finished) and I don't relish the thought of them considering me lame. This is a prime example of why I've never shared with anyone that I've published books. I wouldn't want them to read them. That's also why I write under a pen name.

It's not that I'm terrible at recounting memories. I did write my memoir and it was pretty entertaining. But writing for strangers is much less mortifying than writing with the possibility of a loved one reading it. 

The problem I encountered when I finally dived into that first question was "try-too-hard-itis". My husband mentioned something related to that the other day. He's got a blog going, which no one reads, because no one reads blogs; but he's sent the link to a couple of friends, who've ostensibly read some of the posts. My husband is an essayist and his niche is cultural issues. As he was reading through it, he asked me to delete a specific post, because it was too fakey. He'd fallen into the trap of trying to write what he thought his friends wanted to read. He told me, "There's no point in writing if I'm not going to be true to myself." He's new to writing, so he's just now discovered a principle I learned years ago.

If I'm ever going to complete this project, which my son is counting on me finishing, I need to somehow answer the questions as if no one is going to read them. That's a difficult mindset to get into. And every answer doesn't need to be a deep essay, although I'm assuming a book kind of needs to be book-length. So, I'll start over; write out my answer simply describing the scene, and if I can punch it up a bit after the fact, fine.

I thought being given a writing exercise would be fun. I've got an inkling my assumption was wrong.