Why does In Cold Blood still build suspense when the ending was public?

The outcome was in the newspapers, so suspense had to be built out of something other than what happens. Capote splits Part One into two lines of travel, the family at the farm and the two men driving toward it, and cuts between them at the moment each line becomes hardest to leave. You hold a piece of knowledge the people in the scene lack, which turns an ordinary Saturday into something close to unbearable. Sol Stein has a name for the version of this that works against a known ending, negative suspense, and his example is Forsyth's assassin stalking a de Gaulle every reader knows survived. The question stops being whether. It becomes when, and how near, and in what order you will be told.

Where does Capote's judgment of the killers actually happen?

In the running order. The book gives you Perry Smith's childhood, the legs a motorcycle wrecked, the guitar and the dream of a bird before it gives you what he did in that house, and it gives you the hanging last of all. No sentence in the narration argues for mercy. The arrangement argues for it. Move the confession to the front and the same paragraphs convict him instead, which is the part worth stealing and also the part that should make you cautious, since a reader who feels they reached a verdict unaided has been steered harder than a reader who was told what to think.

How reliable is In Cold Blood, and what does that mean for the method?

Parts of it have been contested for decades. Researchers working from the case records have questioned specific scenes, the graveyard meeting at the close among them, and the argument is not one this page can settle, since the people who could confirm any given sentence are the same people whose recollections are being weighed against each other. For a writer the useful point sits one level up. A scene assembled from interviews reads exactly like a scene somebody watched, because Capote removed the seams that would let you tell the two apart, and the removal is the achievement and the exposure in a single move. Compare the visible seams in Michelle McNamara's account of the Golden State Killer, where the author stays on the page and you can watch her infer. Pick one before you draft.

How does he write a character who dodges every direct question?

Give the evasion a different shape each time it happens. Holly Golightly deflects with the cat, with money, with a plan to marry somebody rich, with a sudden warm interest in whoever is asking, and no two deflections use the same tool. What she withholds reaches the reader by other routes, through a husband who turns up looking for a girl called Lulamae, through the weekly trip to Sing Sing she describes as a favor. Capote also hands her one honest term, the mean reds, which she separates carefully from the blues. A character who dodges everything is a mannerism. A character with one exact word for her own fear is a person.

What do his fiction and his reporting have in common?

Both halves run on a narrator who knows less than the reader soon will. Breakfast at Tiffany's opens years after the fact, in Joe Bell's bar, over a photograph of an African carving with Holly Golightly's face on it, so the story you then read is already a story about somebody who got away. In Cold Blood does the reverse and puts the ending in a section title. Either way you enter each scene carrying information the scene does not contain. Patricia Highsmith built whole novels on that arrangement, keeping you at a killer's elbow through several hundred pages with no narrator anywhere in the book willing to use the word out loud. The traffic between his fiction and his reporting runs through structure, and the sentences are the smaller part of it.

Why do his flattest sentences hit hardest?

A flat sentence makes the reader do the reacting. Capote reports the worst moments in the register of a report, with no adjective telling you how to feel about them, and the pressure has nowhere to go except into you. David Lodge described what withheld interiority does to a reader in his reading of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, where the absence of any inside view throws the whole burden of interpretation back across the page. Capote applies that mechanism to real people. You are given the mattress box Perry Smith fetched so his victim would lie more comfortably on a basement floor, and the sentence that reports it carries no adjective, no aside and no comment, which leaves you holding a detail with nowhere to put it.

Non fiction

Truman CapoteWriting Style

Born 9/30/1924 – Died 8/25/1984

Cut between two parties heading for the same collision, hand the reader the outcome early, and let the order of arrival deliver the verdict you refuse to write down.

Write like Truman Capote

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Truman Capote: voice, themes, and technique.

Part One of In Cold Blood cuts back and forth between two sets of people who have not met. On one side of the cut the Clutters go through an ordinary last day at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas, and Nancy shows a neighbor's daughter how to get the crust right on a cherry pie. On the other, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith buy rope and tape and drive west. The section is titled The Last to See Them Alive, so nothing about the outcome is left to find out, which means the suspense has to be manufactured somewhere else. It is manufactured in the cutting.

The killings are missing from Part One altogether. They arrive much later, inside Perry Smith's confession, so the reader's first full view of that night comes from the man who did it, in his order, with his emphases and his account of his own hands left standing. The same alternation turns up later in Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, an architect on one line and a murderer on the other, and the comparison shows how much of the effect here belongs to the structure rather than to the prose.

No sentence in the book argues for Perry Smith. You get the wrecked legs, the guitar, the box of letters and maps, the recurring dream of a bird that carries him off, and all of it is placed before the confession without being labeled as mitigation. Then the confession. Then the executions. Rearrange those three blocks and the book makes a different case out of the same sentences. That is the most useful thing on offer here. It is also the most unsettling.

The method has a bill attached. Scenes reconstructed from interviews read exactly like scenes somebody watched, and researchers working from the case records have disputed several of them, including the graveyard meeting the book closes with. That problem is produced by the technique. A page written as though a witness stood there cannot show you which parts were reported and which were assembled. His fiction runs the same machine at lower stakes: in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly reaches you through a neighbor who is fond of her and slower than she is, and everything that matters, the name Lulamae, the Thursday visits to Sing Sing, the dead brother, arrives late and sideways.

How to Write Like Truman Capote

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Truman Capote.

1
Finish both lines, then interleave them
Draft your two lines separately and carry each one to its end. Then cut them into pieces and lay them into each other, placing every cut where the reader least wants to leave, because the value of a cut is measured by what it costs to make it. Capote does this in Part One of In Cold Blood with a family's last day and two men on a highway, and the seam between them does work no transition could manage. Number the pieces. Read the interleaved version aloud in one sitting. Mark the point where your own interest drops, because that is where a cut is standing in the wrong place.
2
Give the ending away early
Tell the reader what happens before you show it happening. A section title will do the job, or an opening line, or one flat sentence on the first page, and what you get in exchange is a reader who reads every ordinary detail as a countdown. Nancy Clutter teaching a neighbor's daughter to crimp a pie crust would be nothing much without the title standing over it. Pick your most ordinary scene and put the knowledge in the reader's hands first. Then write the scene as though that knowledge were not there.
3
Hand the worst scene to the wrong narrator
Locate the event your piece exists to deliver, then refuse to narrate it yourself. Capote keeps the killings out of Part One and lets them arrive later inside Perry Smith's confession, with his pauses and his sequence and his account of his own hands, so the reader's first complete view comes from a source they can neither trust nor dismiss. Find the person in your material with the strongest motive to shade the story. Give them the microphone at the moment of maximum need. Your own narration keeps the small business.
4
Test the verdict by reshuffling the blocks
Print the piece, cut it into its major blocks and lay them out on a table. Now shuffle. Read the version where the crime comes first and the childhood second, then read the version Capote chose, and watch your sympathy travel a considerable distance while the sentences on the page stay word for word identical to what they were. That comparison takes a quarter of an hour and contains the whole craft argument of In Cold Blood. Keep the order you can defend, then delete the paragraph where you explain it, because the order has already said the thing.
5
Mark every sentence you did not witness
Build a scene out of an interview. Then go back through it with a second color and mark each sentence you were not present for. Weather, a gesture, the order in which two people spoke, the temperature of a room. Capote worked the Kansas reporting with Harper Lee taking notes beside him, and the finished pages give no sign of where testimony ends and reconstruction starts, which is why the book has been argued over ever since. Decide in the marked copy which unmarked sentences you are willing to publish. Make that decision once, deliberately, rather than fifty times by accident.
6
Write the one subject that goes unnamed
Pick a fact your characters know and will not say. Give each speaker a separate route around it, a joke, a compliment, a change of subject, an offer of a drink, and forbid yourself the line where somebody almost names it. Holly Golightly takes four or five of these routes inside one conversation, and the reader assembles Lulamae Barnes out of the gaps she leaves. Read the scene back and ask what a stranger would learn from it. If the answer is everything, you explained it somewhere.

Truman Capote's Writing Style

Breakdown of Truman Capote's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

The first page of In Cold Blood is an inventory. Capote walks the village of Holcomb the way a surveyor would, naming the grain elevators, the depot, the two filling stations, the bank, and he keeps the clauses coming in a long level line with no judgment anywhere in it. Then the paragraph ends short. That pattern holds through the book: an accumulating sentence to lay out what is there, a four-word sentence to close the account. He saves the shortest constructions for the facts a reader will flinch at, and because the sentence itself does not flinch, the flinching stays where he wants it, on the reader's side of the page rather than in the prose. Truman Capote's writing style decides, paragraph by paragraph, which length carries which job. Length is an assignment here, not an ornament.

Vocabulary Complexity

Plain nouns carry the worst material. The rope, the tape, the shotgun, the mattress box, the names of the four dead members of one family. None of it is dressed up. Where the vocabulary rises is inside quoted speech, because a word somebody reaches for is a fact about that person, and Perry Smith reaching past his schooling for a formal phrase does more than a page of background could. Place names do heavy duty too. Holcomb, Garden City, the state penitentiary at Lansing, all flat, all exact, all of them earning their keep. A reader trusts a writer who can name things. He then spends the trust.

Tone

Read the confession and count the words that editorialize. Capote keeps the register of a report and uses the vocabulary a coroner would use, and the effect on a reader has nothing calm about it. Distress has to go somewhere. Denied a narrator who gets upset on their behalf, readers get upset on their own. That is the whole transaction. He runs the same refusal in the comic register. Breakfast at Tiffany's is told by a man too fond of Holly Golightly to see her clearly, and his fondness is the joke and the sadness at once. The tone shifts between books. The refusal to supply the reader's reaction does not.

Pacing

Persons Unknown, the second part, is the stretch where a weaker book would sag. Nothing gets solved in it. The two men drive to Mexico and back, write bad checks, sell a car, and in Kansas the investigators run out of leads while the town starts locking doors that used to stay open. Capote holds you through that emptiness by keeping both lines running and cutting at the point where you least want to leave, so the question shifts from what happened to when these lines touch again. The break arrives from a third place entirely, from a former cellmate who remembers a conversation about a safe in the Clutter house, which is the kind of luck a reporter cannot arrange and a novelist would be too embarrassed to invent. There was no safe. After that the tempo changes character, and the last part moves at the speed of a calendar that cannot be stopped.

Dialogue Style

Holly Golightly answers questions she was not asked. Bring up Texas and she talks about the cat, or about money, or about a man she plans to marry, and the swerve tells you more about Texas than an answer would have. Capote gives her a different exit every time, which is what keeps the evasion from reading as a tic. Her real name reaches the reader because somebody else says it out loud. Perry Smith talks in long stretches that reach for words above his schooling, and the reaching is the characterization, since a man borrowing a term he has only ever read is telling you where he wishes he had come from. In The Duke in His Domain, his profile of Marlon Brando, the subject talks and talks while Capote adds nothing at all, which leaves the entire verdict sitting in the reader's lap. Speech in his work is a way of not saying something.

Descriptive Approach

Objects arrive in his pages the way exhibits arrive in a courtroom, tagged and then left for you to weigh. Perry Smith travels with a cardboard box of letters, a journal, maps and keepsakes he cannot throw away, and Capote lists the contents without mentioning that the list is a life. Nancy Clutter's diary gets the same handling. In Breakfast at Tiffany's the card slotted into Holly Golightly's mailbox announces that she is travelling, and behind her door sit suitcases that have stayed packed, which is her whole position stated in furniture. He rarely tells you what a thing means. He puts it where the meaning becomes unavoidable.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Truman Capote uses across their work.

The Converging Cut

Two lines of travel, alternating, ending in a collision the reader knows about and the people in the scene do not. The mechanism is the reader's surplus knowledge, which turns a cherry pie and a length of rope into the same object, and Charles Baxter has the cleanest account of where that knowledge comes from, calling the angle a reader holds on a character a possession of that character's future. The hard part is discipline in the cutting. Leave one line running too long and the other goes cold, and a cold line has to be restarted rather than resumed.

The Withheld Center

The event the book exists for goes missing from the place a reader expects it and comes back much later inside somebody else's voice, which is a second decision stacked on the first and the one that settles the book. Withholding on its own is ordinary. Withholding and then delegating is the move that deserves a name, because the delegation decides whose version becomes the reader's memory of the night. Perry Smith's confession supplies the killings, which means the definitive account of what happened in the Clutter house belongs to the man with the most to lose by telling it straight. The tool has one hard limit, which is that a book gets one use of it.

Order of Arrival

Sequence delivers the judgment the narration declines to state. Mitigating material before the crime produces one reading and the same material after it produces another, and no sentence has to change for the reading to flip. Capote uses this to keep a book about four murders from turning into either a plea or a prosecution. What makes it demanding is that you have to know your verdict and then leave it unwritten. A reader who catches you steering will steer back.

The Exhibit List

Physical inventories, set down without comment, left for the reader to weigh. Perry Smith's box of letters and maps, Nancy Clutter's diary, the mattress box carried into a basement, the card in Holly Golightly's mailbox saying she is travelling. Each item has to be readable the same way by any reader without explanation, which is a high bar that rules out most of the interesting objects a writer collects, and the list has to stay short enough that a reader recognizes an item when it comes back.

The Fond Narrator

A first-person witness who likes his subject too much to interpret her and therefore hands the interpreting to you. The narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany's records Holly Golightly's contradictions and resolves none of them, and the frame around him, an old bartender and a photograph of a carving, tells you at the start that she left and was not found. Affection is the technical choice. Contempt would let the reader relax, because a narrator who has already judged somebody has done the reader's work for him, and this device pays out only while that work is left undone.

The Report Register

Flat unmodified sentences for material that would carry an adjective in any other book. The rope, the tape, the shotgun and the four bodies get the same voice as the grain elevators. That flatness reads as fairness, which is its second job, because a reader who suspects arrangement stops cooperating with the writer. One requirement catches imitators. Flatness holds only while the details underneath it are strong enough to work unassisted.

Literary Devices Truman Capote Uses

Literary devices that define Truman Capote's style.

Cross-cutting

Alternating sections follow two parties who have not met toward the place where they will meet. The device carries the structural load of Part One of In Cold Blood, and it produces suspense out of a known outcome, which straight chronology cannot do. The obvious alternative, one continuous line with the killers introduced after the crime and the family already dead by page one, would turn the same material into a procedural and give up the one thing chronology cannot buy. Cutting also forces compression, since each return has to justify itself inside a paragraph or two.

Sustained dramatic irony

The reader is handed the ending and then spends hundreds of pages watching people walk toward it. Baxter's phrase for a reader's angle on a character, being in possession of what the character lacks, describes what a family breakfast feels like once the title above it has done its work. Capote extends the effect across a whole book instead of a scene, which is unusual, and it explains why the ordinary passages are the frightening ones, since a reader who knows the ending reads a shopping list as a threat. Any warning from the narrator would collapse the thing into melodrama.

Withheld interiority

The inside is off limits. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith reach the reader through what they say, what they carry and what other people report of them, so you have to build the interior from the exterior. The choice answers a hard problem in a book about a real crime, where an omniscient tour of a killer's mind would be an invention beyond defending. It also pushes the whole business of interpretation across the page to you, which is why the last part is so uncomfortable to read.

Retrospective frame

A story told from a point where everything is finished, by somebody who was there and did not understand it at the time. Breakfast at Tiffany's opens in a bar with a photograph and a question about whether the woman in it was ever found, and every scene after that is read through the answer. The frame lets Capote keep the comedy of Holly Golightly's evasions light while a loss sits underneath the whole performance, so the jokes and the grief share the same paragraphs without either giving way to the other. A straight chronological version would have to choose between the two.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Truman Capote.

Borrowing the poise and skipping the architecture

The prose was the last thing he built and it is the first thing writers copy. Long level sentences and a cool narrator will get you an essay with a pleasant surface and no forward pull, because the pull in In Cold Blood comes from two lines converging on a night the reader already knows about. Take that out and the poise has nothing to hold up. Build the structure on index cards before you write a sentence you are proud of. The voice is a consequence of knowing what you are keeping back.

Reading the missing verdict as having no case

Capote takes no position in the narration and a very firm one in the running order, and that division of labor is easy to miss and expensive to copy wrongly. Writers who take the neutrality alone produce a piece that gathers material and points nowhere, which readers experience as a writer who could not make up his mind. Norman Mailer avoided the trap in The Executioner's Song by letting a condemned man's own words carry the middle of the book while the arrangement did the arguing. Settle your verdict first. Then hide it in the sequence, where a reader will find it and think they brought it with them.

Reconstructing scenes without keeping the seam

A scene rebuilt from three interviews and a court transcript reads exactly like a scene the writer stood in the room for, which is the whole appeal of the method and also the reason a careful reader eventually starts checking on you. Capote's book has been argued over on this ground for decades, the graveyard scene at the end included. An imitator inherits the ambiguity without inheriting the reporting, and the result is a piece where nothing can be checked and the writer has lost track of which parts were given to him. Keep a marked copy for yourself. Publish the version you can defend line by line.

Playing the evasive character as charm

Holly Golightly is funny, and the funniness is a byproduct of somebody managing her own exposure with limited resources, which is the part imitators cannot see, because the shortage is what sets the shape of the jokes. Imitations make her quirky. They hand her eccentric props and a whimsical vocabulary and lose the pressure that produced the eccentricity in the first place. Look at what she is protecting: a girl called Lulamae, a dead brother, a marriage she walked out of. Her charm has to cost her something on the page. Charm that costs nothing is decoration.

Books

Explore Truman Capote's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Truman Capote's writing style and techniques.

Why does In Cold Blood still build suspense when the ending was public?: The outcome was in the newspapers, so suspense had to be built out of something other than what happens. Capote splits Part One into two lines of travel, the family at the farm and the two men driving toward it, and cuts between them at the moment each line becomes hardest to leave. You hold a piece of knowledge the people in the scene lack, which turns an ordinary Saturday into something close to unbearable. Sol Stein has a name for the version of this that works against a known ending, negative suspense, and his example is Forsyth's assassin stalking a de Gaulle every reader knows survived. The question stops being whether. It becomes when, and how near, and in what order you will be told.
Where does Capote's judgment of the killers actually happen?: In the running order. The book gives you Perry Smith's childhood, the legs a motorcycle wrecked, the guitar and the dream of a bird before it gives you what he did in that house, and it gives you the hanging last of all. No sentence in the narration argues for mercy. The arrangement argues for it. Move the confession to the front and the same paragraphs convict him instead, which is the part worth stealing and also the part that should make you cautious, since a reader who feels they reached a verdict unaided has been steered harder than a reader who was told what to think.
How reliable is In Cold Blood, and what does that mean for the method?: Parts of it have been contested for decades. Researchers working from the case records have questioned specific scenes, the graveyard meeting at the close among them, and the argument is not one this page can settle, since the people who could confirm any given sentence are the same people whose recollections are being weighed against each other. For a writer the useful point sits one level up. A scene assembled from interviews reads exactly like a scene somebody watched, because Capote removed the seams that would let you tell the two apart, and the removal is the achievement and the exposure in a single move. Compare the visible seams in Michelle McNamara's account of the Golden State Killer, where the author stays on the page and you can watch her infer. Pick one before you draft.
How does he write a character who dodges every direct question?: Give the evasion a different shape each time it happens. Holly Golightly deflects with the cat, with money, with a plan to marry somebody rich, with a sudden warm interest in whoever is asking, and no two deflections use the same tool. What she withholds reaches the reader by other routes, through a husband who turns up looking for a girl called Lulamae, through the weekly trip to Sing Sing she describes as a favor. Capote also hands her one honest term, the mean reds, which she separates carefully from the blues. A character who dodges everything is a mannerism. A character with one exact word for her own fear is a person.
What do his fiction and his reporting have in common?: Both halves run on a narrator who knows less than the reader soon will. Breakfast at Tiffany's opens years after the fact, in Joe Bell's bar, over a photograph of an African carving with Holly Golightly's face on it, so the story you then read is already a story about somebody who got away. In Cold Blood does the reverse and puts the ending in a section title. Either way you enter each scene carrying information the scene does not contain. Patricia Highsmith built whole novels on that arrangement, keeping you at a killer's elbow through several hundred pages with no narrator anywhere in the book willing to use the word out loud. The traffic between his fiction and his reporting runs through structure, and the sentences are the smaller part of it.
Why do his flattest sentences hit hardest?: A flat sentence makes the reader do the reacting. Capote reports the worst moments in the register of a report, with no adjective telling you how to feel about them, and the pressure has nowhere to go except into you. David Lodge described what withheld interiority does to a reader in his reading of Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man, where the absence of any inside view throws the whole burden of interpretation back across the page. Capote applies that mechanism to real people. You are given the mattress box Perry Smith fetched so his victim would lie more comfortably on a basement floor, and the sentence that reports it carries no adjective, no aside and no comment, which leaves you holding a detail with nowhere to put it.

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