Capote left an unusually detailed account of how he wrote and never attached a number to any of it. The process he described puts three passes on a page before it is even provisionally finished, which tells you more about his rate than a word count ever could.
Three Passes Before Anything Is Provisional
In his 1957 Paris Review interview, Capote laid out the sequence. The first version went down in longhand, in pencil. Then a complete revision, also in longhand. Only after that did he type a third draft, and he did the typing lying down with the machine balanced on his knees.
Three full passes by hand before a page reaches even a provisional form. That is the fact that makes a daily word count useless for him. The same paragraph gets written three times, and the third version might be shorter than the first.
He called himself a stylist and said stylists become notoriously obsessed with the placing of a comma and the weight of a semicolon. He also admitted the obsession irritated him beyond endurance. Whatever his daily output was, a large share of it went on punctuation he had already set once.
Six Years for One Book
The number that actually measures Capote's output is In Cold Blood. The Clutter family was murdered on 15 November 1959. Capote reached Kansas within weeks. Perry Smith and Richard Hickock were executed on 14 April 1965. The New Yorker began serializing that September, and Random House published the book in January 1966.
Six years, for a book of about 340 pages. The reporting produced a reputed 8,000 pages of notes, a figure repeated everywhere and sourced nowhere very firmly, though the scale fits what is known about how he worked. He and Harper Lee took no recordings and few notes in the room, reconstructing conversations from memory afterwards.
Run the six years as a daily rate and you get roughly one finished page every six days. The reporting time swamps the writing time, which is the honest answer for any writer working in that mode.
A Small Shelf, and Why
Capote's fame is out of all proportion to his output. Other Voices, Other Rooms in 1948, which took him two years, then The Grass Harp in 1951, Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1958, In Cold Blood in 1966, and Music for Chameleons in 1980. Answered Prayers was never finished and appeared after his death.
Five books of consequence across roughly thirty-five years. Set that next to Patterson's two hundred, or King's sixty-plus, and the tradeoff shows up in the prose. Capote's sentences hold under the kind of close reading most fast-written books cannot survive.
Slow does not guarantee good. Plenty of slow writers produce nothing worth the wait. What his case demonstrates is that a three-pass longhand method has a maximum speed, and choosing it means choosing the size of career that comes with it.
For the horizontal method, the memory technique behind In Cold Blood, and the superstitions, see the full Truman Capote writing routine page.
Reading how Truman Capote worked is the easy part. The Writer's Daily Practice gives you a page for every morning of the year, and each one ends with a prompt to get you writing.
Get the Book on Amazon →365 mornings, in paperback and Kindle.
What You Can Steal
- Build revision into the first pass. Capote's second longhand draft came before he ever touched a keyboard. Nothing reached the machine unexamined.
- Change the physical medium between drafts. Pencil, then pencil again, then the typewriter. Each switch forces a fresh reading.
- Count the project rather than the day. Six years is the real measure of In Cold Blood. A daily figure would have told him nothing useful.
- Write where you actually think best. Capote worked lying down for decades because that was where his mind worked. The desk is a convention rather than a requirement.