Work, meditate, meditate above all; condense your ideas–you know that lovely fragments are no use. Unity, unity, that is everything. The whole: that’s what’s lacking in all writers today, great and small. A thousand fine bits, no complete works. Compress your style: weave a fabric soft as silk and strong as a coat of mail. Forgive this advice, but I’d like to give you everything I desire for myself.
Gustave Flaubert gives his mistress, Louise Colet, some of the best writing advice I, for one, have ever read in a beautiful letter dated October 14, 1846.













