Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
Orhan Pamuk
Interviewer:
When you're experimenting with ideas, how do you chose the form of your novels? Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?
Pamuk:
There is no constant formula. But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode. I try to change everything. This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it's a shame you didn't write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one -- I've heard that especially about The Black Book. In fact I hate to hear this. It's fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently.
The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources. With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter. I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter. Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier. The point of view changed because now there were other painters talking. At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists. That was how I found my subject.
Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies. Sometimes, for example, you've just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I'll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree. Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel. And you feel, Wonderful, no one's done this before.
Finally, I think of things for years. I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends. I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write. Sometimes I don't write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel. So when I'm finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects; and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.
Panuk's books include The White Castle (1990), My Name is Red (2001), The Museum of Innocence (2009). His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2005
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