I suppose you have to be a certain age to recognize the name Truman Capote. He was one thing to me before prison - the raconteur on talk shows, the giddy villain in Murder by Death. While in prison, I got to read some of his short stories - they are impressive and worth reading - and In Cold Blood, which may all he will be remembered for.
The Guardian ran Notes, ponderings, doodlings: behind Capote’s creation of In Cold Blood. I found this interesting to me:
All the notes are written by hand, which is how Capote preferred it. He would complete all his drafts by hand – no typewriter in sight.
Many of the pages carry copious revisions and deletions, with some completely scratched out. That gives a clue to his legendary attention to detail.
As he told the Paris Review in 1957, two years before he began work on In Cold Blood, he thought of himself as a stylist. “And stylists can become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma, the weight of a semicolon. Obsessions of this sort, and the time I take over them, irritate me beyond endurance.”
There is also an example of him revising a particular sentence. Worth looking at to see how a writer works.
sch 7/1
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