And as I began to discipline and harness myself, began for the first time to examine as coldly and as clinically as I could the tough problems which before this I had refused to face, I had a fine revelation. I realized that what had been lacking in my novelist's vision was really a sense of architecture - a symmetry, perhaps unobtrusive but always there, without which a novel sprawls, becoming a self-indulgent octopus. It was a matter of form, and up until now this was an issue that out of laziness or fear, perhaps both, I had tried to avoid. I completed Lie Down in Darkness on a spring evening in 1951 in a room on West Eighty-Eighth Street in Manhattan.
William Styron Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Essay, 'Lie Down in Darkness [pub. Hartford Courant Magazine, January 3 1982] - p.327, 328
- work
- This Quiet Dust and Other Writings (1982)
- year
- 1982
- locator
- p.327
Cite this record
“And as I began to discipline and harness myself, began for t…” William Styron. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-1371F66433. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/1371f66433
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