Capote's experiments with creative reporting began in 1950 with Local Color, a work which marked a shift from fiction to reportage. Local Color was a collection of travel pieces the author wrote from various visits to other cities. It was the beginning of a style of point-of-view that would mature by the time In Cold Blood was released (Reed 95-96). In an interview with writer George Plimpton, Capote said many critics were unsympathetic about his idea of combining journalism and literature, feeling it was "little more than a literary solution for fatigued novelists" (Plimpton).
"It seems to me that most contemporary novelists...are too subjective... I wanted to exchange it, creatively speaking, for the everyday objective world we all inhabit...reporting can be made as interesting as fiction, and done as artistically..." Capote also felt that to be a good creative reporter, one must also have a firm grip on ficition writing (Plimpton). He also said good literary journalism should incorporate themes that, like good, news-worthy journalism, should be timely. "[Y]ou want to be reasonably certain that the material not soon 'date,'" he said.
He also said, "murder was a theme not likely to darken and yellow with time...the first essential of the nonfiction novel--that there is a timeless quality about the cause and events. That's important. If it's going to date, it can't be a work of art.
In Cold Blood Analysis
In Cold Blood marked a peak in Truman Capote's career. The book was both an acclaimed literary success and a huge financial success, and when it came out, book reviewers called 1966 "the year of Capote." In fact, many critics agreed that Capote was finally getting the success he deserved after paying his dues writing for print and magazines (Garson, 1). What made the book so unique in the literary world was the author's style of "creative writing mingle[ed] with realism and novelistic imagination." Capote utilized journalism in his novel by giving the reader facts in a "straightforward newspaper fashion, but as a creative artist selecting details" and reproducing them like a painter carefully creating a fine portrait (Garson, 143).
Capote photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1948
In Cold Blood is divided into four sections, each presented like a vignette: "The Last To See Them Alive," "Persons Unknown," "Answer," and "The Corner." Each of the chapters are written like short stories within the main story, each presenting a different scene or setting than the previous chapter. As Capote began writing his book about the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, it became important to him that he keep himself out of the story. "My feeling is that for the nonfiction-novel form to be entirely successful, the author should not appear in the work," he said in his interview with George Plimpton.
According to Capote,critics became curious
According to Capote, critics became curious about how he could reconstruct the conversations of the dead family without interjecting his own opinions. "'How can you reconstruct the conversation of a dead girl, Nancy Clutter, without fictionalizing? Each time Nancy appears in the narrative, there are witnesses to what she is saying and doing - phone calls, conversations, being overheard...All of it is reconstructed from the evidence of witnesses which is implicit in the title of the first section of the book "
The Last to See Them Alive'...Of course it's by the selection of what you choose to tell" (Plimpton). Capote spent six years working on his book. A great deal of time was spent collecting data and research on the case and its players. "I did months of comparative research on murder, murderers, the criminal mentality, and I interviewed quite a number of murderers - solely to give me a perspective on these two boys," he said in his interview with Plimpton. Capote went on to say, "I'd say 80 percent of the research I did I have never used...I suppose if I used just 20 percent of all the material I put together over those years of interviewing, I'd still have a book two thousand pages long!"
In Cold Blood
In speaking of the his writing process for In Cold Blood, Capote remarked, "I worked for a year on the notes before I ever wrote one line. And when I wrote the first word, I had done the entire book in outline, down to the finest detail ... It began, of course, with interviews - with all the different characters of the book" Capote cites two examples of how he used the interviews within the text. In the first part of In Cold Blood - the part named "The Last to See Them Alive" - there is a long narration delivered by the school teacher who went with the sheriff to the Clutter house and found the dead bodies.
Capote said he set that into the book as a straight complete interview, although it was done several times. In the final version, the teacher tells the whole story himself, describing exactly what happened from the moment they got to the house, and what they found. Also in the first part of the book, there is a scene between the postmistress and her mother when the mother reports that the ambulances have gone to the Clutter house. Although the scene reads as a straight dramatic scene, it was developed from interviews just like the one with the school teacher. However, in this case Capote compiled all his information and transposed it into straight narrative means (Plimpton).
Observation
In other parts of the book, Capote uses yet another journalistic tool to build his story - observation. By visiting Holcomb, Kansas, and not just reading about it, Capote was able to paint a visual for his readers. One example of Capote's observation technique reads, "The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes" (Capote, 3) Of all the journalistic techniques employed by Capote, none is more important than the research he did to acertain the factual information, which is the backbone of the story.
Concerning his extensive research, Capote says, "My files would almost fill a whole small room, right up to the ceiling. All my research. Hundreds of letters. Newspaper clippings. Court records - the court records almost fill two trunks... I have some of the personal belongings - all of Perry's because he left me everything he owned; it was miserably little, his books, written in and annotated; the letters he received while in prison. . .not very many. . .his paintings and drawings...I think I may burn it all
The book is what is important. It exists in its own right. The rest of the material is extraneous, and it's personal. What's more, I don't really want people poking around in the material of six years of work and research. The book is the end result of all that, and it's exactly what I wanted to do from it" (Plimpton).Reviews of In Cold Blood were mostly positive, except for a few reviewers who did not understand Capote's new style of writing. One reviewer, Jimmy Breslin of the Herald Tribune, said Capote's work could "affect the type of words on pages...for a while" (Clarke 363-365). According to Kenneth Reed, in his book Truman Capote, the author went on to make almost two million dollars from re-print and movie rights sales (95).