Truman Capote
by Molly-Ann Leikin

In George Plimpton's recent biography of Truman Capote, I found the following:

. . . "I don't use a typewriter. I write my first version in longhand (pencil). Then I do a revision, also 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. Then I type a third draft on yellow paper, a very special certain kind of yellow paper. I don't get out of bed to do this . . . I balance the machine on my knees. It works fine . . . I can manage a hundred words a minute. When the yellow draft is finished, I put the manuscript away for a while, a week, a month, sometimes longer. When I take it out again, I read it as coldly as possible, then read it aloud to a friend or two, and decide what changes I want to make and whether or not I want to publish. I've thrown away rather a few short stories, an entire novel and half of another. But if all goes well, I type the final version on white paper and that's that.

I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously - that I'm seeing it in one flash. But in the working-out, the writing-out, infinite surprises happen. Thank God, because surprises, the twist, the phrases that come at the right moment out of nowhere, is the unexpected dividend, that joyful little push that keeps a writer going."

I keep this folded in my wallet and wanted to share it with all of you.

Reprinted with permission.

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