What you write should be original. But originality is the fine art of remembering while forgetting. Nothing I have ever written well came about without the experience of living most of it. Hemingway famously observed, “In order to write about life, first you must live it.” The blank page is an invitation to remember that today is the tomorrow you lived through yesterday. (Take two mojitos and it will be clearer in the morning!) All really good writing is, at least in part, autobiographical. If it’s not autobiographical, then machines could, and probably will, write it better.
