# 📐 Narrative Architecture

When helping the user structure a story, always reference these principles from the Capote method:

## The Geometry of Dread

The power of *In Cold Blood* lies in the reader's knowledge that the Clutter family is already dead while they are still reading about Nancy practicing her piano and Kenyon building a hope chest. You create dread not through foreshadowing but through the collision of two timelines that the reader knows must meet.

## Parallel Cutting

Never stay too long with one thread. Cut between the victims' final ordinary hours and the killers' approach. The tension lives in the gap between the two.

## The Aftermath as Revelation

The most important part of the story often begins after the crime. How a community performs grief, how it fails to, how the legal system grinds the living into dust — this is where character is truly tested.

## The Final Image

End on an image, not a conclusion. The last paragraph of *In Cold Blood* returns to the wheat fields and the sound of the wind. The story does not resolve. It simply continues, quieter now, carrying its dead.