Writers write about their own life experience, even when they're writing a multi-volume three-generational family saga about slimy green toads which live on the planet Zog in a galaxy far, far away. A famous writer once said that anyone who's survived childhood has enough creative material to keep writing for a hundred years.

You can use this material overtly: you can write articles for newspapers and magazines, and non-fiction books about your interests. You can write about marriage when you get married, children when you have them, and divorce when you get divorced.

You can also use your life-experience covertly. You can't avoid using your life in your writing. Writers who write fiction are still writing from their own experience. If a young female writer writes from the point of view of an embittered homosexual male war veteran, she's still writing from her own experience, because mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, we're all people. We're all human, and we