William Styron: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)
William Styron
William Styron on the most difficult problem a novelist has to cope with:
Well, the book [novel Lie Down in Darkness] started with the man, Loftis, standing at the station with the hearse, waiting for the body of his daughter to arrive from up North. I wanted to give him density, but all the tragedy in his life had happened in the past. So the problem was to get into the past, and this man's tragedy, without breaking the story. It stumped me for a whole year. Then it finally occurred to me to use separate moments in time, four or five long dramatic scenes revolving around the daughter, Peton, at different stages in her life. The business of progression of time seems to me one of the most difficult problems a novelist has to cope with.
American novelist and essayist William Styron (1925-2006) published a number of novels and collections, including The The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), Sophie's Choice (1979), and Havanas in Camelot (2008). His interview with The Paris Review was published in 1954.
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