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 … - William Styron

" "

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.