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On Writing...
Dec. 18th, 2006 10:59 pmGo read this: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/061225fa_fact1
Here's two brief excerpts:
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
And later in contrast:
I was afraid of opening my father’s suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.
It's from My Father's Suitcase -The Nobel Lecture - 2006 by Orphan Pamuk,
Here's two brief excerpts:
A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is. When I speak of writing, the image that comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or a literary tradition; it is the person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and, alone, turns inward. Amid his shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man—or this woman—may use a typewriter, or profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I do. As he writes, he may drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time, he may rise from his table to look out the window at the children playing in the street, or, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or even at a black wall. He may write poems, or plays, or novels, as I do. But all these differences arise only after the crucial task is complete—after he has sat down at the table and patiently turned inward. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
And later in contrast:
I was afraid of opening my father’s suitcase and reading his notebooks because I knew that he would never have tolerated the difficulties that I had tolerated, that it was not solitude he loved but mixing with friends, crowds, company. Still, later my thoughts took a different turn. These dreams of renunciation and patience, it occurred to me, were prejudices that I had derived from my own life and my own experience as a writer. There were plenty of brilliant writers who wrote amid crowds and family, in the glow of company and happy chatter. In addition, even my father had, at some point, tired of the monotony of family life and left for Paris, where—like so many writers—he had sat in a hotel room filling notebooks. I knew that some of those very notebooks were in the suitcase, because, during the years before he brought me the case, he had finally begun to talk about that period in his life. He had spoken about those years when I was a child, but he had never discussed his vulnerabilities, his dreams of becoming a writer, or the questions of identity that had plagued him in his Paris hotel room. He’d spoken instead of the times he’d seen Sartre on the sidewalks of Paris, of the books he’d read and the films he’d gone to, all with the elated sincerity of someone imparting important news.
It's from My Father's Suitcase -The Nobel Lecture - 2006 by Orphan Pamuk,
