 |
|||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
Back to Featured Interviews >>
MEET LAURENCE YEP
|
|||||||||||||||||
 |
| Laurence Yep |
I grew up in an African-American neighborhood but went to school in Chinatown so even though I had friends in both neighborhoods, there were times when I felt like an Outsider. As a child of two ghettos, I could never get into the popular children's books of that time because books about life in the suburbs or on farms. Instead, I read science fiction and fantasy because in those books, children leave our ordinary world and go to some faraway place where they have to learn new customs and even languages. Science fiction and fantasy talked about adapting and survival and that's what I did whenever I got on or off the bus. My favorite science-fiction writers were Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. Robert Heinlein taught me how to write first-person narratives-I loved how, in the space of a few paragraphs, he created a voice and a character with whom you wanted to travel across the galaxy. Andre Norton taught me how to write about worlds on the point of change.
If you didn't write as a child, then when did you start writing and what inspired you to start?
I had intended to become a chemist because I had a wonderful chemistry teacher-in fact, when I graduated from high school, I won the science award and not the literary awards. However, in my senior year, I had an English teacher, Reverend John Becker, S.J., who told me that if I wanted to get an "A" in his course, I had to get something accepted by a national magazine. Of course, I got only a rejection letter, but that was enough to satisfy him when I showed it to him and he retracted the threat. However, the experience taught me that a rejection letter might depress you for a couple of weeks, but you didn't die so I kept sending out stories. I wound up selling my first story when I was 18. That story was later included in World's Best Science Fiction of 1968.
Where do you get your ideas?
I taught at U.C., Berkeley and I found that it didn't matter if students were 8 or 18: They all thought that they had to travel to faraway places or have an adventure like a shipwreck. I would try to teach them that all they had to do was pay attention to the world around them. Good writing brings out the specialness of ordinary things.
Do you work on more than one book at a time?
Yes, I remember that Mark Twain once said he would put aside a story when he was running out of steam creatively and switch to something else. I often work on several projects at the same time. However, I make sure the projects are in different genres. For instance, I might work on a fantasy story at the same time as a mystery story. When the ideas stop coming on one, I shift over to the other. I suppose I've always done that. At the same time that I wrote Dragonwings, I was also working on my doctoral dissertation on William Faulkner.
What are you working on now? When do you expect to start submitting it to publishers?
At the moment, I'm revising a book Angel Island: Conversations with My Father, about my father's trip to America. The National Archives has over 400 pages of interviews and photos of my father's family. It includes an interview with my father when he was only ten-years-old. It's like having a time machine that lets me listen to my father when he was a child. I'm also finishing a novel about a Chinese American basketball team. It's based partly on the adventures of a real professional Chinese American team that barnstormed across the country in 1939-1940. They even played the Harlem Globetrotters. I'll be turning that in to the publisher in the summer. The working title is Dragon Road.
Do you write very day and do you have set hours that you work? When is your next book going to be in book stores?
When I taught creative-writing, I told my students to have a set time and place. It might be the kitchen table for only an hour, but keep at it. When you write, you're opening a window into your imagination so readers can step into it. If you keep to a regular time and place for writing, the window will begin to open automatically-It's like the metal gates on the stores at the mall. At a set hour, the gates start to rise.