John McPhee -- almost peerless as a prose stylist -- wrote an essay for the New Yorker about his process called "Draft #4." For him, #4 is the draft after the painstaking labor of creation is done, when all that's left is to punch up the language, to replace shopworn words and phrases with stuff that sings.

The way you do it, is "you draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity." You go looking for le mot juste.

But somehow for McPhee, the dictionary -- the dictionary! -- was the fount of fine prose, the first place he'd go to filch a phrase, to steal fire from the gods.

Take a simple word, like "flash." In all the dictionaries I've ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I'd've had no reason to -- I already knew what it meant. But go look up "flash" in Webster's (the edition I'm using is the 1913).

https://web.archive.org/web/20160108161120/http://machaut.uchicago.edu:80/websters