Outlining with Gay Talese

Thanks to Catapult New York Bureau Chief MH for passing along this Paris Review interview with Gay Talese. It includes the following exchange:

Interviewer: When did you realize that you had talent?

Talese: Never.

Better yet, as a special bonus for New Journalism junkies, there’s this outline, written on a piece of shirt cardboard from a laundry, for Talese’s hugely influential Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.”

You knew he was a masterful stylist, but it turns out he takes more interesting notes than everyone else, too. And maybe the two facts are not unconnected.