Truman Capote’s bizarre writing routine: “I am a completely horizontal author”

Posted On February 2, 2025February 2, 2025

All artists seek inspiration in different ways. For the writer, be it a lifelong professional or a budding amateur, it may be a deathly silent room to encourage zen-like bursts of inventive creativity, or the high-staked pressure of an imminent deadline may be the cracking whip needed for the less disciplined among us to frantically smash out a panicked, brilliant piece of literature.

For acclaimed 20th-century New Orleans author and celebrity debutant Truman Capote, a wholly idiosyncratic and unique ritual to his writing process was candidly revealed, adding much fuel to the mythos he draped himself in.

There are typically two very disparate pieces of work Capote’s defined by. The first is 1958’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, detailing the exploits of socialite and ‘It girl’ Holly Golightly, immortalised by Audrey Hepburn’s depiction in the 1961 film adaptation and her shrewd fraternising with wealthy men as she manoeuvres her way further up society’s class ladder.

Framed via the first-person narration of an unnamed writer who befriends Holly, the novella’s original bittersweet ending and darkly farcical finale excised from George Axelrod’s Hollywood feature.

From 1940s Manhattan to the rural plains of Kansas, Capote turned his hand to true crime in 1966’s In Cold Blood, analysing the murders of the farming Clutter family in ’59 by convicts Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Accompanied by friend and To Kill a Mockingbird novelist Harper Lee, Capote travelled to West Kansas’ Holcomb and conducted over 8,000 pages of research, compiling an exhaustive amount of material to explore the killers’ lives, the victims and the murders’ effects on the small Finney town. A landmark piece of non-fiction in the New Journalism wave, inserting himself as a writer into the piece instead of just a dry reportage of the events set an enduring example in true crime.

Fuelling his scores of essays, screenplays, and short stories that orbit his two defining works was a highly peculiar practice before flexing his literary muscles: “I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping,” Capote told The Paris Review in ’57.

Adding: “As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis. No, I don’t use a typewriter. Not in the beginning. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a complete revision, also in longhand. Essentially, I think of myself 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.”

You can’t argue with the results. As one of the most celebrated writers in modern American literature has revealed, perhaps the secret to writing success is ditching the laptop, chilling on the sofa, and ensuring the liquor cabinet is never too far away. Whether his literary elixir can be found floating in a cocktail is hard to say, but we can all agree his system damn well worked for him.

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