Lightning and the Lightning Bug

A bit over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain made the famous remark that “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.”  At around the same time, Gustave Flaubert came up with his le seule

Read more

Search-and-Destroy

I wrote my first novel on a typewriter, and one of my most vivid memories of that is proofreading the final submission draft and trying to decide, over and over, whether it was worth retyping a whole page in order to get rid of one too-common word

Read more