Can a good painter make a good writer?

Novelist Orhan Pamuk seems to think so, if the same body houses both.

Pamuk is a painter and these are the following things he says the painter in him taught his writerly self:

1) 
Don’t start to write before you have a strong sense of the whole composition, unless you are writing a lyrical text or a poem. 

2) 
Don’t search for perfection and symmetry — it will kill the life in the work. 

3) 
Obey the rules of point of view and perspective and see the world through your characters’ eyes — but it is permissible to break this rule with inventiveness. 

4) 
Like van Gogh or the neo-Expressionist painters, show your brushstrokes! The reader will enjoy observing the making of the novel if it is made a minor part of the story. 

5) 
Try to identify the accidental beauty where neither the mind conceived of nor the hand intended any. The writer in me and the painter in me are getting to be friendlier every day. That’s why I am now planning novels with pictures and picture books with texts and stories

A Turkish Great Expectations

Orhan Pamuk's newly released novel Silent House is really his second novel.

The Guardian speculates that it wasn't released in the West in 1983 (year of its publication in Turkish) because back then Pamuk may have been considered as a parochial--too Turkish for Western consumption--writer.

But then he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 and rocketed into becoming cosmopolitan and "universal" overnight.

Yet in a review of the novel the NYT compares the novel to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. The reviewer describes Fatma, the protagonist-matriarch of the novel as a

Turkish Miss Havisham, embittered and trapped in the past, haunting the decaying mansion outside Istanbul where she lives alone with her servant, a dwarf who also happens to be her late husband's illegitimate child.

The review doesn't see anything particularly "Turkish" in the novel. On the contrary, a Western spirit seems to pervade it.

In the vein of Virginia Woolf, Pamuk displays an interest in the consciousness, though he renders the consciousness "

not as a series of thoughts broadcast out into the ozone, like Mrs. Dalloway's but as an imaginary conversation with a specific person who never answers.

Fatma can never forgive her husband and constantly argues with her dead spouse and it's this fight with an unavailable or disinterested interlocutor that makes up the spine of the novel's plot.