Laurence Yep Quotes

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

When you spend time with your friends, what do you talk about? Those things which made an impression on you that day, that week ... I write stories the same way. Events at home, in school, at work, in the street, these are the bases for a story. Some experiences leave such a deep impression that instead of talking about them at the club I work them into a novel.

To be a writer you should read, write and talk to people, hear their knowledge, hear their problems. Be a good listener. The rest will come.

When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.

I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.

I was a schoolteacher; I taught seventh and eighth grade, and I tried to write fiction on the side.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.

The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.

That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

There's a saying - "Write what you know." It's bad advice if you take it as an unbreakable rule, but good advice if you use it as a foundation.

They always say, doing what I do for a living, write what you know and then people will respond to it. I luckily had a very charming, lovable mom who I think everybody could see bits and pieces of their mom in. All I had to do was write a character that was like my mom, and it made my life easier.

Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

I learned how to write television scripts the same way I have learned to do almost everything else in my entire life, which is by reading.

When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

I love to write what I see and what I do and what I experience, and I like to see if people can relate to that. I don't know if I am as good at making up a story in my head that has no truth to it, so that is a challenge for me.