Gustave Flaubert was a method writer. Robert Greene says that's what makes Madame Bovary so alive: "Flaubert was this creature of the right word, and he would sometimes spend three days trying to figure out the right word for this one sentence." "He gets very much caught up in his stories. So when he wrote Madame Bovary, he was, like, literally becoming Madame Bovary. He becomes the characters that he writes about." "But at the same time, he's a very careful, conscientious writer who's pouring over every sentence. They're not contradictory. The two go together." "But because he's inside her world and he's a very disciplined writer who focuses on how language can create a world, he's able to bring the two together. That's sort of the dance that the greatest writers go through."