The Clutter family murder, In Cold Blood, and what you can learn about writing from Truman Capote

In the news today, an arrest in a horrifying murder case in Florida, one that's being compared to the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas, the case which inspired Truman Capote to write his groundbreaking "nonfiction novel," In Cold Blood.

In Cold Blood inspired much of the "new journalism" of the 1960s and 1970s, although it can't be said to have begun the interest in writing about terrifying real life murders. That trend goes back, in America, to lurid tabloids like The Police Gazette, and 19th century folk songs inspired by real life murder cases, like "Banks of the Ohio" (linked here to the Johnny Cash version).

Writing about murder is not for everyone, nor should it be. But taking stories from real life can be a starting point for many writers and aspiring writers. If you're interested in a decidedly non-bloodthirsty approach to putting real life stories together into a fascinating narrative, look at Tracy Kidder's books on building a house or teaching in a grade school.

If you're interested in this sort of writing, you have to develop the skill of finding out what people have to say, and this means listening. If you're interviewing, come prepared with questions, but don't ram your questions down the interviewee's throat. If you do that, you're not really listening to the responses -- you're just writing them down so you can get to your next question. And you miss all the good stuff.

Here's what Truman Capote did before he even started the work on In Cold Blood.

He trained himself to remember. He worked at memory exercises. And when he went out in the field, he never used a notebook or a tape recorder. His theory was that people would open up more, would tell you the really important stuff, is they didn't feel as though they were being interviewed.

It was a technique Capote called "the secret to the art of interviewing." Capote's secret was to tell his subject a considerable amount of information about himself, which reversed the roles and gave the subject the feeling of being the interviewer. Then the subject would lose inhibition and share his story with Capote (Connery 241-242). He also began to record details of interviews in his mind, without the use of traditional resources. "Twelve years ago I began to train myself...to transcribe conversation without using a tape-recorder. I did it by having a friend read passages from a book, and then later I'd write them down to see how close I could come to the original. I had a natural facility for it, but after doing these exercises for a year and a half, for a couple of hours a day, I could get within 95 percent of absolute accuracy, which is as close as you need."

From the Truman Capote page at All American, "an Internet encyclopedia designed to help you find thorough, accurate information about American literature, history, and culture," hosted by University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

Source: http://www.examiner.com/x-2862-NY-Writing-Careers-Examiner~y2009m7d14-The-Clutter-family-murder-In-Cold-Blood-and-what-you-can-learn-about-writing-from-Truman-Capote