Research, Horizontal Verse Vertical, and THE LIST!

Hi Everyone! Happy Friday.

Today, I would like to draw your attention to Mr. Truman Capote, who had a funny way of talking but sort of changed Creative Nonfiction forever. I am thinking specifically, “In Cold Blood” about which, I read, he kept 8,000 pages of interview notes. A wiki type entry puts it this way:


“Truman Capote's finest accomplishment is his 1965 novel, In Cold Blood. It is an entirely new kind of novel -- journalism, done as fiction. The novel relates the brutal murders of Herbert Clutter and his family, commited by paroled convicts Dick Hickock and Perry Smith. Capote was so intrigued by the story that he traveled to the scene before the names of the killers were known. He interviewed both Hickock and Smith, who were both later executed. In Cold Blood was published first serially in The New Yorker in 1965, and then as a book the following year. In an interview, Capote described his thinking: Journalism was horizontal, and fiction was vertical. He wanted a mix of the two.”

Here’s an interview with him from 1966. Pay attention starting at 3:30 where he talks specifically about the vertical verses horizontal.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7111397200984613874

I've been thinking about what I like most about the assigned reading for this week -- the biography/collage/research that D'agata brings to the table, and the extremely close tone of the Pillow Book. So I've developed some exercises you might want to try to play around with both of these techniques. What I’d like to focus on this coming week is a kind of vertical research a la Truman Capote. Both Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine have written gorgeous lyric books, but both have a lot of research threading through them. I have already seen some of this in your work (Becky's first piece; a suggestion to Leslie on her Braided piece). Research in some ways requires us to create a third person meta persona: our love of history and what else is happening outside the scene, and the actual scene itself. On that note, I thought I’d offer my own example. Here is the opening of an essay I wrote called “Trees in the Desert” that was published in an anthology called “Choice” a few years ago. I think it illustrates my love of moving around (ie third person telescoping) in time and also lists:


The mountains around Salt Lake City looked like the knees of giants pulled up under blankets. That winter, in one of the mountains most popular ski areas, the Gold Miner’s Daughter Lodge waited to explode. In the center of the Mormon Temple, in the center of the city, a couple dressed in white clasped hands in the room of Endowments, re-enacting the Garden. The Temple was the center, the whole city expanding outward in the four directions, a grid that stretched on until it reached the tudra of the salt flats. Here the Donner party had stopped before their deadly winter in the Sierra Nevadas and walked over the hard surface, which crunched beneath their boots like snow. One hundred years later, the Enola Gay dropped bombs on the same spot; later still, motorcycles, cars, rockets, flew past each other here, faster than any on earth. In 1985, it was the place where a Swedish sculptor listened to Beethoven’s 9th and continued building, with tons of concrete and 2,000 ceramic tiles, an 87-foot-tall “Tree of Life” in the middle of the desert.

We were trying to get the abortion over with by the time my parents came to visit. The Indian doctor at the Salt Lake City Women’s Clinic said “You are too skinny – see, I can feel all your organs,” pushing on me with her hands. On my back on the papered examining table, my belly sloped concave between hipbones. A white hospital sheet dangled from my neck like a mammoth paper towel. The doctor’s hands were warm and soft. My parents and three sisters would be arriving in a week for a spring-break skiing vacation. They didn’t know I was getting an abortion. The doctor was a large woman, wearing aqua-blue eye-liner. “Go home,” she sighed, “you aren’t pregnant.”




This is the beginning of the essay.

When I am writing, what I most want to figure out is this: what to summarize and what to expand, make a list, explode with detail? How to get the vertical? How to get the horizontal?

Truman Capote went to Kanasas and interview everyone in town in depth. Real depth. He knows everything about them, then he goes about reconstructing the murder and the trial and what follows. It’s a master-piece. It reads just like a novel but its nonfiction. I know, we are focusing on the Lyric Essay, but bear with me for a moment....today I want to focus on the CNF side of the Lyric Essay.

I'd like you to consider interviews, perhaps, for your next piece. Normally when we interview someone, we just want to capture their “statement” we want to respect them; we don’t want to push. Same holds true for our families. How long have we been hearing the same old family stories? How long have we been telling our same old stories? Sometimes it’s easier (when we are not thinking so much) just to write it down. But that’s not what Capote did. He asked the town about everything. What they were wearing what they were eating what everyone said to each other. Rumors and gossip. He described place in utter and complete detail down to the phrases embroidered on pillows in the room where the young teenage boy was killed. He described in detail people who were only tangentially involved to make the point: everyone was involved.

You can also do this with your own work. Dig deep for memories, make lists; look at history, make another list; what did it smell like there? How did the wind taste? Try to remember what you were feeling, what people where saying, what you were saying: make another list. Nothing is better than the Lyric Essay for lists!

So, the prompt (should you choose to accept it) has two parts:

Part One: Researching Yourself


a. Pick a scene from your memory and practice self-hypnosis. Deep interviewing but of yourself. Think of it in the third person and so describe, as if in a crime scene, every detail you can remember. What color were the walls, what time of day was it, stay in the moment…think of the 5 senses. Smell, hearing touch, taste. Just make a giant list. It doesn’t have to make sense – stream of consciousness. It should seem, at some point maybe a bit tedious.

b. Do some research now. What was happening just outside the scene, moments before, moments after, days, months, years, hundred of years? What was happening that day on the other side of the country? What was happening in Russia? What was a movie star saying to another movie star? Who was about to write the last page of a manuscript of a famous book? What ship was about to go down? What weather was happening? Make a list. Doesn’t have to make sense.

c. This is harder (for people like me): remember what you were feeling. Make a list. Remember, or try and imagine (empathy) what others were feeling. Speculate. What was their view of you then? What was your view of yourself then? How has the view changed? What is the view now? If you could go back, what would you say to you? What was society thinking of you? What was it that you were keeping a secret? What did you tell and you wish you hadn’t? Make a list.

Part Two: Vertical and Horizontal

Now, using all this newly “found” material, write a scene from scratch. What are you going to include from your lists? How will this fill out your story? When will you zoom in and when will you zoom out? That part is how you can play with it. Sometimes you can do what I do which is to leave in some lists.

Think also about tone and pychic distance. Do you want an intimate Pillow Book voice or a more reporting D'Agata voice?

Have fun!