Capote gave advice the way he did most things, with total confidence and a line you couldn't forget. He wasn't sentimental about talent or waiting on inspiration. He talked about writing as a craft, with rules you could learn and a rhythm you could wreck, and he did his real revising with a blade. The man who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood believed style was earned at the sentence level, one cut at a time. Most of what's worth keeping came out of his 1957 Paris Review interview and his later conversations about the work, and it holds up better than a lot of advice from writers who sounded warmer.

The Direct Answer
Learn the rules of writing cold, then rearrange them to suit yourself.
His counsel from the 1957 Paris Review, and the razor he trusted more than the pencil.

Learn the Rules, Then Break Them

Asked whether writing could be taught, Capote didn't reach for magic. Before the memorable part, he said something plainer: work was the only device he knew of. Then he compared writing to painting and to music, arts with their own laws of perspective, light, and shade. If you were born knowing those laws, good for you. If you weren't, you learned them, the same way a painter learns the frame or a composer learns the scale. Once you had them, you were free to bend them to your own ends. The freedom came after the mastery, never in place of it, and the effort came before both.

Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade, just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

Truman Capote, Paris Review, 1957

He Trusted the Scissors

For Capote, the real writing happened in revision. He was ruthless about cutting, and he said outright that he believed more in the scissors than in the pencil. The first draft got the words down. The work that mattered came in taking them away, trimming a sentence until its rhythm held, because he thought a story could be wrecked by a single faulty beat toward the end, a mistaken emphasis, even an ill-placed comma. He drafted twice in pencil before he ever typed a word, and even at the typewriter he kept cutting. He would sooner lose a good line than let it throw off the sound of a paragraph.

That obsession with rhythm ran through everything he wrote. He called himself a stylist and made no apology for it, listening to his sentences for the exact place where the music broke and treating a clumsy cadence as a real flaw rather than a matter of taste. It's the kind of care that only shows up when a writer reads slowly and rewrites often, which is precisely what his pencil-first routine forced him to do. For the daily habits that gave all this cutting and rewriting somewhere to happen, see the full Truman Capote writing routine.

What You Can Steal