The Authentic Electic
Fiction Research: How Far is Too Far?
A cautionary tale from the life of Truman Capote.
Some novelists have, in the course of their careers, reached a terrifying and occasionally impassible point when they realise they have nothing left to say. I’m not talking about writer’s block. I’m talking about the inability to write or even get fired up about any future project.
Truman Capote is a particularly stark example of someone who reached the end of himself in this respect. The book that provoked this horrifying state of affairs was his masterpiece In Cold Blood, published in 1966. Why after penning such a seminal text was Capote unable to write another full-length book? There were short stories that followed, the odd television screenplay, and attempts at longer works (with one early novel published posthumously), but it is true to say that he was never the same man after In Cold Blood. The question is why?
In Cold Blood details the appalling true story of how the Kansas Clutter family were murdered and the killers subsequently tried and executed. The events are known to the reader from the outset, so what keeps the reader interested is the rather ghoulish knowledge that at some stage the killers, mainly Perry Smith, will spill the gory details of their senseless massacre…