In a time before the open and watchful eye of technology, in an unknown part of the Midwest, in a town of a few hundred people, in the stillness of a cool and windless night, in four different rooms of a well-known farmhouse.\u00a0 In four blasts of a borrowed shotgun.\u00a0 In the Clutter family\u2019s house.\u00a0 Every life there was taken.\u00a0 In cold blood.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve read Truman Capote\u2019s most famous \u201cnon-fiction novel\u201d of that very famous title, you have read what many consider to be a classic of American literature and the finest true-crime book ever written.\u00a0 It\u2019s a book that\u2019s not simply well written, it\u2019s a series of stories exceedingly well told.\u00a0 This is my second in a two-part blog where I look at 6 things Capote did that translate well to storytelling in the courtroom and teaching storytelling in the classroom.\u00a0 In the January blog I did a decent job at not spoiling key details in the story.\u00a0 This month\u2019s installment, however, contains one fairly large spoiler in the final segment.<\/p>\n
The Thrill of a Chase<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>In a good-sized chunk of the book you follow, in parallel stories, those who are chasing down the two killers of the Clutter family and the two killers themselves.\u00a0 In the last blog I discussed the narrative power of parallel storytelling.\u00a0 I write this month, however, about the narrative impact of the chase.\u00a0 One thing Capote does well is catalog the mistakes the killers are making as they change locations, bouncing around to hide themselves while also grifting enough to feed their stomachs and their habits.\u00a0 Seeing the mistakes, the reader gets an immediate sense that a payoff is coming\u2014the forming, foreboding clouds of justice that would appear right before the cloudburst of their capture.\u00a0 We wait eagerly for it.\u00a0 But it doesn\u2019t come.\u00a0 Not immediately, anyway.\u00a0 It\u2019s difficult to know the reality of how close the cops got to the killers with each mistake or each fumbled breadcrumb of evidence.\u00a0 What we do know is that Capote makes each escape feel like a matter of inches.\u00a0 The close calls create tension.\u00a0 However, there is also a greater onset of anxiety when the killers slip again and again through the snapping jaws of justice.\u00a0 With that, the reader feels an internal tension as we start to doubt what we already know\u2014that these two will<\/em> actually be caught.\u00a0 The creation of tension is the creation of narrative momentum.<\/p>\n A good storyteller knows and plays with the listener\u2019s expectations.\u00a0 This has to be done with a purpose, however.\u00a0 Subverting a listener\u2019s expectation merely for shock value can cause cynicism and a sense in the listener or reader that the storyteller is manipulating them.\u00a0 The subversion of expectation also can\u2019t be so jarring that it dislodges the listener from the world of the story.\u00a0 A reader or listener should not be jolted back into the real world where they will now start to think about whether the subversion makes any sense or whether a particular character is authentic anymore.\u00a0 Here, I think of Luke Skywalker, without a moment of reflection, tossing his long-lost lightsaber over his shoulder at the beginning of The Last Jedi<\/em>.\u00a0 I may only be speaking for myself on this point, but that moment dislodged me from the fantasy right at the start. So, instead of taking in the subsequent scenes of the movie, I was running around my own head trying to think through what I\u2019d just seen. \u00a0The storytellers had jarred me right out of their story.<\/p>\n A Range of Feeling<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>I can remember the first time that I finished watching There Will Be Blood.<\/em> I felt wrung out and hung up damp.\u00a0 Such is the rollercoaster of emotions one experiences about Daniel Day Lewis\u2019s oil-tycoon character. \u00a0You\u2019re sliding slowly with him into his depravity and suddenly you experience a glimmer of hope, softening toward him.\u00a0 But it\u2019s short lived and your disgust with him turns to resentment. Good characters in a story possess a character arc, certainly.\u00a0 They have to change with time.\u00a0 But I believe that the best characters in a story cause us to feel a range of emotions at <\/em>and with <\/em>them.\u00a0 And why shouldn\u2019t it be that way?\u00a0 That is our human experience.\u00a0 We love our loved ones dearly, but there are days when we might not be sure we even really like them.<\/p>\n Capote does this masterfully with one of the killers.\u00a0 He introduces you to his coldness, his greed, and his ugly habits.\u00a0 Then, he pulls back a curtain to introduce light among the darkness of the character.\u00a0 He writes of the killer\u2019s childhood and you see the innocence of the man\u2019s youth.\u00a0 You soften\u2014as we naturally do in the presence of the vulnerability and naivet\u00e9 of a child.\u00a0 To overdo this in the narrative, however, would be manipulative.\u00a0 So, he doesn\u2019t.\u00a0 Capote brings you back into the present and you confront again the man you know to be a killer.\u00a0 Later, you learn of the man\u2019s desperation in life.\u00a0 You learn how lonely he was and you soften, again, at the thought of a cold soul with no external source of personal warmth.\u00a0 Capote does it in doses and it\u2019s all so carefully positioned against the static evil of the other <\/em>killer in this plot.\u00a0 We are never meant to soften toward that guy<\/em>.\u00a0 So, not only do we feel the tension of the shifts in how we warm and cool on one character, we feel the tension between a character we encounter as a real person and his partner-in-crime who never feels perfectly human or humane to us.<\/p>\n The Trapdoor<\/strong><\/p>\n The best stories I have ever encountered were the ones with a big twist. In a good story, we go with the narrative enough to relax, only to realize how artfully we have been led to the moment where we\u2019re upended.\u00a0 I think of Willis\u2019s character in The Sixth Sense <\/em>or the end of Yann Martel\u2019s Life of Pi.\u00a0 <\/em>We can\u2019t always have these moment of dropping a trapdoor from under the listener if the facts of our stories don\u2019t allow it.\u00a0 However, a good storyteller can see the opportunities for this moment where one might not be obvious.\u00a0 Before I go on, I pause for the biggest spoiler warning of the blog.\u00a0 In the book, Capote lets us know two men were in the Clutters\u2019 house that night committing this terrible crime.\u00a0 We know they jointly planned and prepared for that encounter.\u00a0 As you make your way through the book, it becomes clear to you that the mastermind of the whole plot is the real<\/em> killer of the Clutter family. We become convinced that no other person in the story could possibly be evil enough to execute four innocent souls.\u00a0 Then, the ground shakes and we feel ourselves reeling sideways at the step-by-step recollections of the other <\/em>criminal in the house that night.\u00a0 What does he tell us about his confederate; that brooding and callous mastermind of the entire plot?\u00a0 The man who first said that terrible, horrible word [\u201ckill\u201d] out loud\u2014bringing into life death itself?\u00a0 That<\/em><\/strong> man never fired a shot.<\/p>\n I think Capote could have written a different narrative here\u2014knowing the end at the beginning.\u00a0 I imagine the facts were plentiful enough for Capote to never set the reader up for this twist and to save the surprises for some other plot line or character.\u00a0 The important part is that knowing who the readers would suspect, he spotted the opportunity to invite us to sit comfortably over that trapdoor.<\/p>\n Not every tool of storytelling is available to a lawyer in a case for the most likely reason that not every fact will permit the use of every tool.\u00a0 If you asked, therefore, what the biggest takeaway might be from this little two-part blog series, I think I would say it has to be \u201cintentionality.\u201d\u00a0 When storytelling isn\u2019t intentional, it too easily collapses into a chronology of recited facts.\u00a0 However, that kind of cold, taught timeline leads to the end of the rope where story goes to die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a time before the open and watchful eye of technology, in an unknown part of the Midwest, in a town of a few hundred people, in the stillness of a cool and windless night, in four different rooms of a well-known farmhouse.\u00a0 In four blasts of a borrowed shotgun.\u00a0 In the Clutter family\u2019s house.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"coauthors":[203],"class_list":["post-3666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brain-lessons"],"yoast_head":"\n