I don’t have the answer to this but every time I start reading a novel and the protagonist is a novelist in the exact same age/gender/socio-economic demographic as the main character, I want to hurl it through a window. Yes, MarySue, it’s fascinating that you just earned your MFA from Big Expensive University and are turning your minor struggles and trite fantasies of publishing success into a work of “fiction” about a recent MFA grad from Big Expensive University living out her trite fantasies of getting her novel (about someone exactly like her) on the Bestseller list. It’s a veritable hall of mirrors.

Writing strictly from your “lived experience” isn’t fiction, it’s memoir—yes, even when you “fictionalize” your self-insert character by naming her “Kate” or “Alex” or “Ana.” You don’t need to appropriate another’s culture to write fiction but you do need to abandon navel gazing and self-glorification and replace it with imagination, empathy, and research.