From My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk:
We were two men in love with the same woman; he was in front of me and completely unaware of my presence as we walked through the turning and twisting streets of Istanbul, climbing and descending, we traveled like brethren through deserted streets given over to battling packs of stray dogs, passed burnt ruins where jinns loitered, mosque courtyards where angels reclined on domes to sleep, beside cypress trees murmuring to the souls of the dead, beyond the edges of snow-covered cemeteries crowded with ghosts, just out of sight of brigands strangling their victims, passed endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls; and as we made ground, I felt I wasn’t following him at all, but rather, that I was imitating him.
A quick list of techniques I want to try after reading the sentence above:
- Is there something inherently more interesting in long, really long, sentences? See “Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence” by Ed Simon for examples.
- Begin with a general state of affairs that might be resolved in more than one way. Let each word and detail that follows engage readers but deny resolution. End with a surprise or reversal.
- This sentence could be a prompt; specifically, begin with the first phrase and tell the story this sentence tells but in a different location. LA, rather than Istanbul, for example, or the Grand Canyon.
- Explicitly include motion and spatiality in a journey: “He was in front,” “turning and twisting,” “climbing and descending,” “passed,” “beside,” and “beyond.”
- List the mundane (“endless shops, stables, dervish houses, candle works, leathers works and stone walls”), but make the supernatural and religious detailed.
- Consider variations on the first phrase (“We were two women in love with the same man,” “We were two boxers who hated the same manager,” and “We were two teachers hired at the same elementary school,” for example). What implications might follow?
Writing Fiction 