Writing lessons from Truman Capote

 You can start a story in fewer than 10 words. Here’s the first sentence of Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays”:

Yesterday afternoon the six-o’clock bus ran over Miss Bobbit.

 

We readers learn quickly that Miss Bobbit was 10 and that, though a child, she behaved like an adult. She took over the town. Everything seemed to revolve around her and her plans.

That’s what we learn quickly. What we learn slowly is how such a commanding personality, a personality so composed, could get lost for a moment. It was a little girl, not an adult, that run across the road without looking both ways.

If you start a story by giving away the ending, you have to show why that the ending seems to have been inevitable, given the character of the characters. I think Capote’s story passes the test.

I can admire the artistry, but the story, to me, has a fatal flaw. The flaw is a lack of artistry in handling an ugly episode of racism. A Black child, Rosalba Cat, is abused by white boys who are showing off. Miss Bobbit rescues Rosalba and declares that they are sisters. The point is that Miss Bobbit has such a forceful character that she changes the ways of the town. What was formerly unthinkable is accepted.

Acts of racism, like most other acts of violence, are gratuitous, so they’re tough to handle in fiction. A scene can be realistic and still be gratuitous. The details of the abuse in this story, which seemed fine to book publishers in 1948, seem gratuitous to me in 2026.

• Source: Truman Capote’s “Children on Their Birthdays” is in Stories of the Modern South, edited by Benjamin Forkner and Patrick Samway, S.J.; New York, Bantam Books, 1978, pp. 59-76.