Pamuk writes the way novelists did a century ago. He fills notebooks by hand with a fountain pen, and he's held onto that method long after almost everyone else moved to the keyboard.
Fountain Pen and Squared Notebooks
Pamuk drafts in longhand. He writes with a fountain pen in squared, graph-paper notebooks, and by several accounts he fills one page with prose while leaving the facing page blank for the additions and corrections that come later. The physical side of it is part of the appeal for him. He's written about the pleasure of watching the pen move across the paper like a brush, and the smell of the ink. The squared paper gives the lines a grid to sit on, and the ink slows him down in a way he seems to want.
I am a handwriter, perhaps one of the last. I am a museum person and have all the habits of it.
Orhan Pamuk, Alain Elkann Interviews
The notebooks hold more than sentences. Pamuk draws in them too, sketches and doodles set alongside the prose, and he's spoken about the freedom a blank page hands him before anything's on it yet. He's even called himself a graphomaniac, which is roughly how a ten-hour writing day starts to make sense.
He's kept the method long past the point where nearly everyone else switched to a keyboard. He's said the screen never suited him the way paper and ink always have. For Pamuk, writing is rewriting, and the slow hand-drawn pace fits a man who deliberates endlessly over the next sentence and hangs onto every line he's already got.
From Notebook to Manuscript
His handwriting is notoriously hard to read, so the pages don't go straight into type. Transcribers who can decipher it turn the notebooks into clean text and send it back, and then he corrects and adds by hand again, a loop he's likened to Proust reworking his proofs. A computer sits in his life mostly for email. He's said he's a slow writer who has no wish to stare at a screen all day.
He also saves it all. Pamuk has said he's kept every sheet of paper he's written on for decades, which tracks for someone who went on to build a real museum. His Museum of Innocence in Istanbul grew out of a novel of the same name, so the instinct to keep and catalog runs straight through the fiction as well. For the studio where these notebooks fill up and the ten-hour days behind them, see the full Orhan Pamuk writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Try longhand for first drafts. The slower pace can change how the sentences arrive.
- Leave room to revise. Pamuk keeps a blank page beside every written one.
- Separate drafting from typing. Getting words down and cleaning them up can be two jobs.
- Keep your drafts. He's saved decades of pages, and the archive is part of the work.