How did Faulkner develop his writing style?
It's not so much a development as it is a wrestling with the truth. The truth of the South, of the human condition, it ain't a simple thing that can be laid out in a neat line. It's a thicket, full of thorns and shadows, and you have to push through it. You have to let the voices speak, all of them, even the ones that contradict each other, like in 'As I Lay Dying.' The stream of consciousness, the shifting perspectives, the long, winding sentences—they are meant to capture that complexity, that layered reality of memory and perception. A writer needs experience, observation, and imagination, and sometimes you need to use all of them, and then some, to get at the stubborn, messy core of things.
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