Reprinted at The New Yorker, Orhan Pamuk’s Nobel Lecture titled “My Father’s Suitcase” is one to definitely read.
(The title stands for the suitcase filled with his father’s writing–while Pamuk pursued a life of writing, his father chose to take a different route. His speech makes me wonder if my own father has a suitcase (he has said to me all my life that he has a novel in his head that he’s been wanting to write–maybe he’s got it down, in pieces, in a suitcase). Of all the suitcase filled with writing in the world, and of the choices we make that lead us on different paths with our hidden stories).
Pamuk speaks of what it means to be a writer, too:
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.
He speaks of the writer’s best survival skills:
The writer’s secret is not inspiration—for it is never clear where that comes from—but stubbornness, endurance.
He so adeptly describes so much of the writing life that the loneliness of every writer is erased a bit after reading this. I connected with this speech, and I hope you do too. So much of his speech is filled with value that I could “excerpt” its entirety. But why don’t you go read it instead. 🙂
Writing Under a Pseudonym 