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- 📝 Truman Capote’s Writing Routine
📝 Truman Capote’s Writing Routine
"I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy."
Famous Writing Routines
February 16, 2024
Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.
Truman Capote was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor, best-known for his literary classics, the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood.
Intelligence alone can’t make a good writer and style alone can’t make a good writer—that is, not a really important or significant writer—but the two things together make a really good writer.
Truman Capote had always known he was going to become a writer. When he was in first grade, he found out that he could read as well as the average high school kid. “The teachers, curiously enough, were very resentful of it,” he recounted to Interview magazine. “But I began to read a great deal and I would also tell the stories I’d read.” From then on, it wasn’t long before he realised he wanted to be a writer.
When I was a child of about ten or eleven and lived near Mobile. I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which, but I wanted it badly.
When it comes to his daily writing routine, Capote revealed to Interview magazine that he only writes for a few hours a day. “There’s a lot of time that I don’t write,” he revealed. “When I am writing, I try to do it five hours a day but I spend about two of those just fooling around. I’m one of the world’s greatest pencil sharpeners.”
At the start of his writing career, Capote used to keep notebooks to store outlines for potential stories, but over the years he found that this process “deadened the idea in my imagination.” The author believed that “If the notion is good enough, if it truly belongs to you, then you can’t forget it—it will haunt you till it’s written.”
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Read the rest of Truman Capote’s writing routine here.
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