Black Beard Uses Orhan Pamuk as an Excuse to Talk About Himself

This week I began reading Other Colors, the collection of essays, speeches, and other non-fiction writing by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.  It’s a fine book, not really exceptional but enjoyable enough that I continued reading past the first page.

However, the good-but-not-great quality of Pamuk’s writing in this instance drew my attention to an interesting characteristic I have found to be true of all fiction writers: the style and technique they employ in their fiction has very little in common with the style they write anything else.

This is true of Pamuk—his non-fiction is brisk, offhand, and provides only cursory descriptions of the people and places he encounters—and it is also true of myself.  The tone and style I utilize in this space bears little resemblance to that of my fiction.  This is due partly to the constraints of space and time; I try to keep my posts to under 600 words, although I believe so far I’ve gone over that number every time, and I also try not to create the same kind of  dense and lyrical sentences that I strive for in the stories I write.

The aesthetics are simply different for Internet writing than for fiction, and I know I have to approach these posts differently.  And when I agreed to begin posting here, I studied the work of the online writers I admired—Greg Easterbrook, and though not exactly made for the Internet, the opinion columns of the New York Times—in order to get a feel for the characteristics my writing needed to reflect on this site.

My conclusion: I needed to have firm and specific opinions and deliver them in a jocular and pithy way.  (Tangent: the above method is the best way to learn how to write a novel, a short story, a screenplay, or anything else you are interested in creating. You don’t need to take a class, simply study a successful piece in the genre that interests you, then bend your work to fit that image. And if you think this is an amateurish or unrealistic way of writing, then consider this: I know from talking to Ha Jin that when he was writing his recent collection of short stories, A Good Fall, he was also simultaneously reading stories by Chekhov in order to influence his own style).

To me the ability to write with a variety of techniques and tones is the mark of a truly good writer, like Shakespeare writing tragedies, comedies, and sonnets (yes I’m aware that I just indirectly compared myself to Shakespeare), and this is the defining characteristic that separates professional writers from everyone else.  I feel I need to make this distinction because I believe writing is a skill—like singing and or riding a bike—that everyone was taught in elementary school and that everyone therefore has one of the following opinions about: (1) I don’t see what the big deal is about writing stories, or (2) I enjoy reading [insert name of author here], and one of these days I plan on writing a book myself.

Perhaps I’m unduly sensitive about this, but I have to believe there are very few professions in which so many people feel confident they could succeed if only they were inclined.  I doubt Paul Krugman has many people tell him that they plan to become Nobel Prize winning economists just as soon as they find the time to get their PhD, and yet, I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard someone—once they learn I write fiction—tell me they’ve always wanted to try that, or they have some good stories to tell if only they could find the time to write them down, or in complete seriousness, they want to write a book one day.

I don’t rebuke these people, because I suffer fools well, but the truth is that few things annoy me more than to hear some variation of those words come out of a person’s mouth, as though the technique I’ve been crafting for nearly ten years and won’t master for ten more is skill anyone could develop with a little bit of time and patience.  Instead, to diffuse my anger I’ve taken to offering encouragement to the people who express their desire to write, and then, in all earnestness, I tell them that I’ve actually decided to give up writing.  See, I used to play football in high school, I tell them, and I’ve always been interested in playing in the NFL, but it wasn’t until recently that I decided to get in shape.  So, I’ve been lifting weights for the past few months, and I figure by the beginning of training camp next season I’ll be ready to be signed.