Orhan Pamuk Advise for young writers

A novel is like a tree...

What usually happens, at least to me, is that I got some leaves here, some leaves there, and I start from that

It is a mistake to think that you can see the whole tree before setting off to write

Then I got already a bunch of leaves, maybe a part of the trunk, some things very well defined, somethings quite blurry

Eventually you start getting a sense of what kind of tree this is. Another mistake is to think that you got the plot first, what usually happens is that the plot gets build around the connection you make between all the leaves you already got.

As if I were painting some fresco. You go on the left, then up, then to the right, it is not realistic to say you do it in order.

With characters the same thing happens, you have one action, another, another, one event, another, another... The character ends up being the ending result. And then a starting point.

Orhan Pamuk Advise for young writers

When I was becoming a writer, I would not miss the writer interviews at the Paris Review. There I learned, for example, that Faulkner began Sound and Fury with just one image, the one from a girl escaping home from her window. That was it.

When you are painting your tree read novels that have nothing to do with your subject or your style. Read very different novels and steal from them.

And in novel mode all of reality can serve for inspiration. Please keep a notebook, don't trust your memory.

Write everything down.

First I tried to be a poet.

Failed. Became novelist.

It took me some years to write the first and then 4 years to get it published. I had a Tolstoi picture for inspiration. When I got the Nobel I said "I have to write more, now"

Orhan Pamuk Advise for young writers