First: To call yourself a writer, you have to actually write something. If you don't, people at cocktail parties will give you weird little smirky looks and you'll hate it.
Plot is important and fun and a good thing to have, but somewhere along the line you will also have to learn something about technique.
If you want to write your memoirs, write your damn memoirs. Don't call it a novel and embarrass the rest of us. As a corollary to this, just because it happened in real life doesn't mean it's worth writing about.
Money flows towards the writer. Always.*
If it's not fun at least every little once in a while, there's really no reason to be doing it. That goes for a lot of other stuff besides writing too.
A lot more good information about writing can be found from these various and sundry sources:
*I first heard this quote from the redoubtable Steve Eley. I'm not sure where the true attribution lies.