This prompt involves some suspension of disbelief regarding centuries, but otherwise take it seriously for absurdist realism. Truman Capote has made his first great big career hit with the blockbuster book, in cold blood. However, this also induces a certain amount of writers block and fear that his next achievement will not be as big a hit. Truman Capote rises publisher, requesting a $100,000 book advance and pitching his next exciting big project: a non-fiction novel about the Constitutional Convention about 1788.
ChatGPT said:
Here’s a draft of Truman Capote’s letter to his publisher, written in his mix of Southern charm, hauteur, and theatrical absurdist realism:
Letter from Truman Capote to His Publisher (circa late 1960s, after In Cold Blood)
My Dearest (and Most Financially Secure) Publisher,
I write to you not from my desk, where the ghosts of Holcomb, Kansas still rattle their chains and keep me awake at night, but from a hotel suite somewhere between time and eternity. In Cold Blood, as you may recall, has been a titanic success—bestseller lists, movie rights, critics swooning like debutantes. But as with any great triumph, it has left me in a kind of literary paralysis. What possibly could follow a quadruple homicide on the Great Plains? Where does one go after murder in America?
One goes backward, darling. Backward not just in time, but in centuries.
Picture it: Philadelphia, 1788. The air is damp, the wigs powdered, the tempers inflamed. Men of fragile health but monstrous ego sweat and squabble in their waistcoats. It is the Clutter farmhouse all over again, except the family is called America.
I propose—listen carefully, because this is how you will explain it to your accountants—a non-fiction novel about the Constitutional Convention. Yes, a novel, yet true: Madison’s diary entries reconstructed into dialogue, Hamilton’s duels foreshadowed by candlelight, Franklin slipping out for assignations with seamstresses while Washington broods like a statue learning to walk. It will be In Cold Blood, but with quills.
Do not be distracted by those who will say, “Mr. Capote, you cannot report on a Congress from 1788, you were not alive.” Darling, I was not alive for Perry Smith and Dick Hickock’s childhoods either, yet I conjured them whole. Time is but another jailhouse wall to scale. I will reconstruct the Congress with forensic precision—down to the syllables, the coughs, the sweaty silences—until the reader smells the mildew on the parchment and hears the scratching of goose-feathers like the ticking of a time bomb.
The working title? In Cold Ink.
All I require is the modest sum of $100,000 as advance—an investment, really, in the birth of a new genre. We will call it “the Founding Fathers as True Crime.” For were they not criminals of a sort? Traitors to their King, conspirators in secret, smugglers of liberty across the Atlantic?
I await your favorable reply, and possibly champagne.
Yours,
Truman
Would you like me to also draft the publisher’s reaction letter—half horrified, half thrilled at the madness of Truman’s proposal? That could make a fun two-part absurdist exchange.
You said: Y
Letter from Publisher to Truman Capote (circa late 1960s)
My dear Truman,
First, congratulations again on the phenomenal triumph of In Cold Blood. It has not merely sold books; it has invented a new way of writing. You have made America’s heartland dangerous again — and, as our sales figures show, highly profitable.
Now, to your proposal. A “non-fiction novel” about the Constitutional Convention of 1787 (though published, I suppose, for Bicentennial tie-ins in 1976). Philadelphia instead of Kansas. Goose quills instead of shotguns. Instead of blood pooling on farmhouse floors, ink blotting on parchment.
At first blush, this sounds mad. At second blush, it sounds madder still. Yet somewhere between those blushes, I feel the shiver of genius — or at least the tremor of another six-figure print run.
I can already hear the sales pitch: Capote Returns! Not with another grisly murder, no — he has gone back in time, like a literary time-traveler in a silk scarf, to report on Madison’s migraines, Hamilton’s speeches, Franklin’s gout. (Is gout too indelicate for the cover blurb? We’ll finesse.)
You are right: what is treason if not true crime? What is the Constitution if not a conspiracy novel with a happy ending? The parallels with Holcomb are unsettling: a quiet room, men gathered, secrets whispered, and then—bang!—a whole new nation appears on the gallows.
As for your requested $100,000 advance — well, let us say this: in 1787, they called it a “subscription.” We shall consider your request a subscription to genius, payable in installments, provided you produce at least three founding fathers crying in your pages by Easter.
I await your outline (or séance notes, whichever is easiest), and I will have accounting prepare the first disbursement.
Yours faithfully, and nervously,
Your Publisher
Do you want me to take this one step further — maybe sketch Truman’s absurdist sample opening passage from this imagined book (In Cold Ink)? That way you’d have a taste of what the novel-journalism style applied to the Constitutional Convention would actually look like.
