Cognitive effort—and even getting painfully stuck—is likely important for fostering mastery.

Writing at speed privileges what arrives first. The obvious phrasing, the familiar structure, a thought that you heard somewhere before.

A book is not retrieved fully formed from memory, or pulled up in a full bucket from some deep creative well in your body.

You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. —Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)

For his second talk, in the auditorium of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, Pamuk explained the writerly process that rests at the intersection of image and text. The pages of Pamuk’s notebooks contain a running commentary on the labors of writing, as well as intimacies, confessions, and symbolic or poetic codes. They not only trace his travels in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also reveal what might be called the topographies of the writer’s mind. A piece of gossip sits next to an epiphany. A statement of nostalgia shares the page with news of publications or a simple accounting of the day’s expenses. That contrast, in which the profound cohabits with the quotidian, reveals the writer in the messiness of life. Pamuk’s notebooks are the calm eye of a storm of creativity. They are itinerary and raw thought, both meditative and marginal. For anyone interested in the inner workings of a brilliant mind, the notebooks are an addicting pleasure that lay bare the wellsprings of Pamuk’s writing. The images contained in his notebooks, which were projected on a large screen during the event, reveal ideas, visions, daily concerns, and snippets of conversation intertwined with vistas and landscapes. At times, the words actually constitute the “view.” As Pamuk writes, “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.”

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres rose one morning in the dead of winter, shivered into what layers of wool he owned, and went to his bench to boil molten lead. This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it, lift it to the sun to see the colors dance along the walls, or catch one's breath at peacock shades of blue: only, today, to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles, wiping and trimming, making a perfect space for light. When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away each day from the vision in his mind's wide eye to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point. Whole days he spent considering the density of granite, the weathering of hardwoods, the thickness of perfect mortar; all to the greater glory of God. And Vermeer with his houseful of children didn't paint some days, didn't even mix powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes, but hauled in firewood, cleaned out a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering, as he bent to his task, how light shone gold on a woman’s flesh, and gathered in drops on her pearls.