Analysis interview

This interview to Truman Capote, starts with the story of how he began to write when he was ten or eleven and that his first, second and third acceptances were from short stories that for him, is the most exciting writing style. He talks about the way to write short stories, he gives some examples and then he talks about the encouragements he had for writing.

Capote says that when he reads one of his first works, “Other Voices, Other Rooms” he doesn’t feel he is the same person as he was in that time, it has the same intensity but as he grew older, his mentality and interior temperature are extremely different, so he feels as a total stranger to that book.

Capote talks about the way he writes and how the environment or emotions he has influences his writing works and how when he lived in Europe, it helped him to grow up but he will always return home because that is where he belongs. He also talks about his work in films, how he works in a funny way.

He talks about how he writes, “I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy” and names himself as a stylist while writing because he writes in pencil and proofreads also in pencil but becoming obsessed with grammar issues, as comas or semicolons. After doing this, he types the work in a specific yellow paper, while he’s still lying down, and after doing it he puts the manuscript away for a while and in a certain time he reads it to see what he wants to change. Capote has the whole book in his head; the beginning, the middle and the end, but surprises happen, unexpected words or sentences that give a certain difference to each story.

He finishes the interview by saying that criticism helps before being published; once it is published the only thing he wants to hear is good things about the story. Finally, the “superstitiousness” he has

“I have to add up all numbers: there are some people I never telephone because their number adds up to an unlucky figure. Or I won't accept a hotel room for the same reason. I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses—which is sad because they're my favorite flower. I can't allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won't travel on a plane with two nuns. Won't begin or end anything on a Friday. It's endless, the things I can't and won't. But I derive some curious comfort from obeying these primitive concepts.”