Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

Learning rhythm, not rules

We often treat reading and writing like separate skills, as if one is preparation for the other. But Faulkner's point is subtler: reading isn't research—it's osmosis. When you watch how a sentence breathes, how a writer builds tension over three pages, how they handle dialogue or silence, something shifts in your own hands when you sit down to write. You're not learning rules; you're learning rhythm.

The part about reading "trash" matters more than it sounds. We can get precious about our reading lists, as if we'll somehow absorb bad taste. But you can't know what works unless you've felt what doesn't, and sometimes the most useful lesson comes from a clumsy paragraph that fails exactly where it tries too hard. That's the apprenticeship he's describing.

The ending—throw it out the window—is the hardest part to actually do. We get attached to our own sentences, convinced they're doing something important. But Faulkner's giving you permission to be ruthless, which is really permission to fail without it being fatal. You write something mediocre, you recognize it, you let it go, and you write something better next time. The reading prepared you to know the difference.