Walking the Dangerous Line of Journalistic Novels

I was very intrigued by the efforts Capote made to redefine not only journalism, but writing in general. He fused journalistic truth with the structure of a novel. With a novel, to write an adequate story the author must know his characters on an almost deeply personal level to make them convincing. For Capote this is an aspect he focused on deeply, spending an enormous amount of time with the Clutter family murders, just to figure out what makes them tick. He had to get inside their heads, which is what novelists do with their characters, and journalists stray away from. Each part he was fusing was held down by the other. Capote couldn't finish the book until the actual journalistic event he was writing about came to a conclusive end. He was writing journalism, but because he was formatting it as a novel he had to wait on the events to transpire so he could adequately fit the narrative together fluidly. He broke his novel into several parts as he wrote to account for this. It's something that is more widely done today, but for Capote it was truly ground breaking mainly because he was writing as it was occurring, not just reporting the facts, but doing something even more difficult and challenging and that was stylizing the facts together to create a cohesive story as he gained more information and didn't even have the complete picture yet. Capote sums this up beautifully by saying "This book was an important event for me. While writing it, I realized I just might have found a solution to what had always been my greatest creative quandary. I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.”

Also, here is an interview with Capote on his views on capital punishment: