2nd January 2006
I haven’t written for long time. Actually because I am writing in Turkish constantly in these days, I have stopped blogging for a month. However I have discovered that keeping my journal, even not as frequent as I used to do will be good to record daily details of life. I should write the seeds of thoughts here so that with time and more energy I will be able to build stories/essays on them. For this purpose I will update the blog at least twice a week. I guess I will have enough things to write for this frequency and writing two-three pages a week in English will not block my writing fiction in Turkish.
The biggest question for a diamond miner is when he has to stop digging. He digs constantly from sunrise to sunset so that he can feed his family. He digs with the hope that everyday is a day for a piece of a diamond which can earn food for a month. The real fear is he never knows when he should give up digging that well and go into another one for a new start. After each strike of the shovel, he says himself “one more” but this is nothing more than supplying a rhythm for the digging. At the bottom of the well, he is all alone and he decides what to do next! In these lonely hours, he hesitates between “this is enough” and “one more”.
I have been digging myself through writing for the last six years. I sometimes feel the same fear and anxiety which make me hesitant between “keep going” and “stop”. It is a knife with two sharp edges. If I stop then I will be unsatisfied with what I have achieved so far. If I keep digging, I will never know whether or not I am going to find out something worthy. It is same as Camus’ character in Sisyphus with a slight difference. He climbs the mountain with a rock on his shoulders. He actually achieves something but he can not keep the rock at the peak so he has to keep shuttling between top and bottom. Then what is the point?
I have read Pamuk’s Nobel Prize lecture twice. There are a few paragraphs I really enjoyed and I wrote on the top of my notebook. Here are those paragraphs:
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too.
For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.
A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.
Before reading Pamuk’s speech, I have thought in different way. Years ago, I attended to a writer’s conference in Bangkok. She was a British novelist and it was not difficult to see how she suffers when she could not write. She told us that writing a novel is living under the skins of others. From that time till Pamuk’s speech, I was thinking that her approach was the only one. If you want to create a character, you have to think as if you are that person. But Pamuk’s approach is more affordable in terms of writing. It depends on a childish belief as he says. All people are the same. If I am writing a postman, I have to think that this postman had a childhood same as my childhood and he has similar desires as I do. The only problem with this is the proximity of all characters in different stories. If we talk about only ourselves, then all the characters will be more or less the same. Not necessarily! Writer’s personality can be divided into thousands of different characters in different ways. A soldier and a mother can have similar ambitions but their job and the people around them can lead them to different characters. This process can be achieved in the story automatically because once we have the plot and time, then the rest comes easily with the idea the writer wants to give. If the characters are fed by the writers’ own world, they will be more real and more vivid. If something is real, they can not be more real or basically they do not need to be more real. Life is real and its imitation -novel- can be real if only the imitation is done through a right mirror. Perhaps the clearest mirror is writer's own world and his own window to the reality.
I haven’t written for long time. Actually because I am writing in Turkish constantly in these days, I have stopped blogging for a month. However I have discovered that keeping my journal, even not as frequent as I used to do will be good to record daily details of life. I should write the seeds of thoughts here so that with time and more energy I will be able to build stories/essays on them. For this purpose I will update the blog at least twice a week. I guess I will have enough things to write for this frequency and writing two-three pages a week in English will not block my writing fiction in Turkish.
The biggest question for a diamond miner is when he has to stop digging. He digs constantly from sunrise to sunset so that he can feed his family. He digs with the hope that everyday is a day for a piece of a diamond which can earn food for a month. The real fear is he never knows when he should give up digging that well and go into another one for a new start. After each strike of the shovel, he says himself “one more” but this is nothing more than supplying a rhythm for the digging. At the bottom of the well, he is all alone and he decides what to do next! In these lonely hours, he hesitates between “this is enough” and “one more”.
I have been digging myself through writing for the last six years. I sometimes feel the same fear and anxiety which make me hesitant between “keep going” and “stop”. It is a knife with two sharp edges. If I stop then I will be unsatisfied with what I have achieved so far. If I keep digging, I will never know whether or not I am going to find out something worthy. It is same as Camus’ character in Sisyphus with a slight difference. He climbs the mountain with a rock on his shoulders. He actually achieves something but he can not keep the rock at the peak so he has to keep shuttling between top and bottom. Then what is the point?
I have read Pamuk’s Nobel Prize lecture twice. There are a few paragraphs I really enjoyed and I wrote on the top of my notebook. Here are those paragraphs:
The writer's secret is not inspiration – for it is never clear where it comes from – it is his stubbornness, his patience. That lovely Turkish saying – to dig a well with a needle – seems to me to have been said with writers in mind. In the old stories, I love the patience of Ferhat, who digs through mountains for his love – and I understand it, too.
For me, to be a writer is to acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.
A writer talks of things that everyone knows but does not know they know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader is visiting a world at once familiar and miraculous. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end to hone his craft – to create a world – if he uses his secret wounds as his starting point, he is, whether he knows it or not, putting a great faith in humanity. My confidence comes from the belief that all human beings resemble each other, that others carry wounds like mine – that they will therefore understand. All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble each other. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre.
Before reading Pamuk’s speech, I have thought in different way. Years ago, I attended to a writer’s conference in Bangkok. She was a British novelist and it was not difficult to see how she suffers when she could not write. She told us that writing a novel is living under the skins of others. From that time till Pamuk’s speech, I was thinking that her approach was the only one. If you want to create a character, you have to think as if you are that person. But Pamuk’s approach is more affordable in terms of writing. It depends on a childish belief as he says. All people are the same. If I am writing a postman, I have to think that this postman had a childhood same as my childhood and he has similar desires as I do. The only problem with this is the proximity of all characters in different stories. If we talk about only ourselves, then all the characters will be more or less the same. Not necessarily! Writer’s personality can be divided into thousands of different characters in different ways. A soldier and a mother can have similar ambitions but their job and the people around them can lead them to different characters. This process can be achieved in the story automatically because once we have the plot and time, then the rest comes easily with the idea the writer wants to give. If the characters are fed by the writers’ own world, they will be more real and more vivid. If something is real, they can not be more real or basically they do not need to be more real. Life is real and its imitation -novel- can be real if only the imitation is done through a right mirror. Perhaps the clearest mirror is writer's own world and his own window to the reality.
Note: For the whole lecture of Pamuk on the day of receiving Nobel Prize, click on the following link: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2006/pamuk-lecture.html
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