Anderson Speaks

"Writers must base their writing on personal experience and emotion," playwright Robert Anderson '39 said yesterday in a seminar at Eliot House on the role of the writer in theatre and filmmaking.

Anderson, a past Academy Award nominee, said a writer must dare to expose himself and his feelings. "Writers who don't write out of personal experience are forgotten," he added.

Anderson said he advises students who want to write: "Tell me what it's like to be you. Tell your own story, not someone else's. Revitalize the familiar. As long as you keep writing you never run out of material," he said.