“My advice is free, excellent, unsought after but given without stint,” Flannery O’Connor wrote to a novelist friend, tongue firmly in her cheek. To another friend she wrote, “I am very handy with my advice and then when anybody appears to be following it, I get frantic.” I first read The Habit of Being, O’Connor’s selected letters, to learn more about her life and character; it was an additional delight to discover that the letters were full of free and excellent advice for the fiction writer. I got frantic trying to remember it all, so I started writing it down…