Good advise from from the Writer's Digest August 2002 issue. Tracy Chevalier, who wrote "Girl with a Pearl Earring", said the following when asked "Do you have any advice for writers starting out?"

"Write about what you're interested in, not about what you already know. Don't write about yourself--you're not as interesting as you think! There's a whole world out there to explore."

My thoughts exactly. I get alot of flak from well meaning friends, who want me to write about my life. My first reaction is, how boring. I'm not interested in writing a memoir or a biography. I'm a fiction writer, and fiction means the following (dictionary.com):

An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented.
The act of inventing such a creation or pretense.
A lie.
A literary work whose content is produced by the imagination and is not necessarily based on fact.

Word History: To most people “the latest fiction” means the latest novels or stories rather than the most recently invented pretense or latest lie. All three senses of the word fiction point back to its source, Latin ficti, “the action of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.” Ficti in turn was derived from fingere, “to make by shaping, feign, make up or invent a story or excuse.” Our first instance of fiction, recorded in a work composed around 1412, was used in the sense “invention of the mind, that which is imaginatively invented.” It is not a far step from this meaning to the sense “imaginative literature,” first recorded in 1599.

n 1: a literary work based on the imagination and not necessarily on fact 2: a deliberately false or improbable account [syn: fabrication, fable]