Sometimes the ideas do not come and you are left with crippling writer’s block - that ball of anxiety that comes from a blank screen and flashing cursor.

When that happens I reflect on what I have been reading during the week and what has occurred in the news.

This week it has been a series of miniature books curated by Penguin and featuring authors like Jack Kerouac, John Steinbeck, George Orwell and Albert Camus.

The Duke in His Domain by Truman Capote had been sitting on the bedside table this week and finished on Thursday night.

It is a long-form interview Capote did with Marlon Brando in his Japanese hotel room while on location for the film Sayonara.

First published in The New Yorker in 1958, it is a tremendous piece of journalism, filled with Capote’s typical attention to detail, recall of quotes, divergence into background information and first-person observations.

It paints a beautiful portrait of Brando: an enigma torn between his fame and desire to lead a more ascetic life.

But more revealing is how you can see Capote the artist building to his magnum opus In Cold Blood, published eight years later. That work tells the true story of the murder of a Kansas family of four, shot to death in their home by two petty crooks in 1959.

Capote visited the town with his childhood friend Harper Lee (who would win a Pulitzer Prize for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1961). Together they explored the tension in the town after the arrests of the men responsible and took some 8000 pages of notes.

Capote formed a pseudo friendship with one of the killers in a bid to get to the motivation of the massacre. Reputedly he needed to burn that friendship and convince him to tell him why the pair had done what they had done.

It speaks to the ethics and objectivity of journalism and what is ethical and reasonable in getting the story.

What Capote produced was an amazing book he said was entirely true but others have disputed in parts. It was a critical success and remains the second-best selling true crime novel behind Helter Skelter on the Charles Manson’s murders.

As I said, some columns are easy, some are a struggle. Some are really vexing and fail to come to fruition because articulating it is so difficult. I worry this next section will not be explained well.

Having read Capote and being reminded of the themes and courtroom and jailhouse setting of In Cold Blood, the second piece of writing I read this week was the sentencing comments for George Pell.

County Court of Chief Judge Peter Kidd’s comments were a mix of condemnation and compassion, but overall a balanced and reasoned response to the evidence before him and the jury’s verdict.

In all the column centimetres dedicated to the trial, here was a comprehensive, rational and considered response.

It underscored the incredibly difficult role judges and magistrates have in balancing the offence and its impact with public interest and the background of the crime and criminal.

Pell’s crimes were appalling, egregious and devastating for his victims. Those who have vilified the victims or questioned their honesty should be ashamed.

But to equate the crimes to some kind of Nietzschean death of God is hyperbole. To ascribe Pell’s crimes to all priests or all religion is not reasonable.

As Chief Judge Kidd said he was sentencing a man for the crimes he had committed not for the crimes of others or for the failures of the church.

He spoke about the “balanced and steady hand of justice”; that sentences are devoid of outside influence and based only on the evidence before the court and the principles of law.

I am not religious - agnostic at best. Perhaps that’s why the evidenced-based approach and sentence from Judge Kidd was so compelling in its delivery.

Because, not just in this case, but in so many contentious issues in society, we only hear from the extremes of both sides.

Objectivity is a rare commodity in partisan political or societal debates.

A balanced and reasoned approach is often the exception and it should not be the case.