Gertrude Stein, joy, and writing as thinking in flow

Do you love English? Wonderful! Here, every month, you can read about English usages, why literacy is a miracle, what copyediting is (this is what I do for a living), why we shouldn’t write only for our peers, how many errors are acceptable in a text, informal words, slang, what ‘yeet’ means, why we curse, the origin of the word ‘OK’, the international auxiliary language Esperanto, the 16 tenses, problem sentences, the nine parts of speech, French’s influence on English, setting time and word count goals in writing assignments, whether data is plural or singular, the classic style, the plain style, grammar, syntax, vocabulary, prepositions, the active voice and the passive voice.

When I first saw Gertrude Stein’s volume How to write, I opened it and read a few sentences. I thought, What on earth is this?! There must be some mistake. I put it down and moved on. Later, a penny dropped. There had been no mistake. Stein had piqued my curiosity. I returned to the bookstore and bought the book.

When Patricia Meyerowitz was asked to introduce How to write, she 

accepted gladly without knowing at all how I would approach it. Open the book anywhere you like and if you are unfamiliar with the work of Gertrude Stein you will very likely give up before you have gone very far. And even if you are familiar with her work this book will have no immediate meaning to you because it certainly does not tell you how to write. What it does tell you is how Gertrude Stein was writing at the time that she wrote it. (Preface)

So, she asked herself: “how could an outsider who was not writing creatively in the same way as Gertrude Stein describe exactly what she was doing… to… convey some of [her] ideas…” (Preface). According to Meyerowitz, what’s crucial to know about Stein’s writing “is that there is no separation between thinking and feeling and the act of writing. It is all done at the same time” (Introduction). Stein: “The business of Art… is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to completely express that complete actual present” (cited in Intro). Further:

… most people write with their heads. That is to say there is a separation between thinking and writing. When this happens there is almost no feeling in the writing. Thinking and writing at the same time is feeling. Feelings of the moment without any memory. Most writing is a description of thinking that was done before the writing was written and not a realization of the thinking that goes on at the moment of writing. This is the crux of [Stein’s] writing… almost all of it is writing and thinking done at the same time. Writing and thinking about the process of writing. (Intro) 

In Stein’s view, remembering has nothing to do with writing. If “you try to remember what you are about to write”, the writing immediately becomes lifeless – “that is why expository writing is so dull… Think about how you create if you do create you do not remember yourself as you do create” (cited in Intro). Meyerowitz cites examples of Stein “observing and learning and being stimulated by everything she came in contact with. She made contact easily and willingly and with pleasure. This is very clear from her writing and contact with people and places and things was an essential part of her life and work” (cited in Intro).

Stein’s writing is most unusual – playful, a heady mix of sentence structure and poetic prose, fearlessly experimental, oblique, vivacious, joyous, rich in vocabulary, sparse in punctuation, thoughtful, enigmatic, sometimes far-fetched. How to write has been as important to me as Stephen King’s On writing: A memoir of the craft and Steven Pinker’s The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century.Stein shows us how she’s writing rather than telling us how to write. In her plays, she sought to address what Çetin calls “the time problem”. She was drawn to the continuous present:

Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything. This brings us again to composition this the using everything. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again… There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again. (cited in Çetin 1200). 

When writing, she wants us to begin, to begin again, to begin again and again, to experience joy in writing’s purpose, to focus on writing as thinking:

… if you have vitality enough of knowing enough of what you mean, somebody and sometime and sometimes a great many will have to realize that you know what you mean and so they will agree that you mean what you know, what you know you mean, which is as near as anybody can come to understanding anyone. (cited in Intro).

Consider these sentences of Stein’s, drawn from How to write:

Here is an effort.

We will be welcome.

No mention of a little dog.

A house with health and happiness.

It is pretty in the country.

Now here is a sentence.

Think well of having rested for awhile.

Grammar readily begins.

The great question is can you think a sentence.

Successions of words are so agreeable.

A grammar has been called a list of what is to be done with it.

Forget grammar and think about potatoes.

Grammar. Fills me with delight.

My writing is clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and disappear…

According to Meyerowitz, Stein “demonstrates sentences made at the time of thinking. That is thinking and writing done together so that no part of you or the action is separate or behind another part” (Intro). She concludes that How to write is

a concentration of [Stein] thinking about words, sentences, paragraphs, grammar and narrative. There is no better way of understanding it than by trying it yourself. If you sit down and copy out sentences that you like you can really begin to feel the woman, the thought and the feelings that go into her work… A remarkable achievement that leaves you with a feeling of gratitude that there always have been and hopefully always will be a few dedicated and serious artists who no matter what difficulties there are will somehow manage to be creative and vitally productive all their lives. They do it and they are examples for those who follow. (Intro).

Historically, there has been a separation between researching and writing. While I don’t wish to downplay the importance of research, intellectual process, or various study types and study methods, distances between researching and writing point to potentially vast amounts of wasted time. A friend once told me that she planned to spend the first three years of her Ph.D. reading and the fourth year writing. Shocked, I quizzed her about her assumptions.

Question: In the context of, say, a three-paper or five-paper Ph.D. dissertation, how much time would one save if the time between reading articles and integrating their relevant parts on-screen through writing, paraphrasing and referencing – minutes, hours, weeks, months or even years? And how much more joy will you experience while writing?

About

Johan Emerson Grobler has been editing academic and related work since 2007.

When he edits, he takes responsibility for the text, as if he were the co-author. Most of what he does is a blend of copyediting, line editing and proofreading. That is, he assembles words into hard-working sentences that can be inhaled like ice cream.

A great edit can be the difference between approval or rejection, resources allocated or denied, a sale or no sale, and a cum laude or a summa cum laude.

A member of Professional Editors’ Guild (member number GRO 007), Johan has assisted authors to successfully submit papers to at least 89 journals.

Sources

Gertrude Stein: How to write. With a new preface and introduction by Patricia Meyerowitz. 1975. Dover.

Patricia Meyerowitz: Preface to How to write by Gertrude Stein. Last modified 9 October 2021.

Patricia Meyerowitz: Introduction (partial, not full) to How to write by Gertrude Stein. Last modified 9 October 2021.

Ferdi Çetin: Gertrude Stein’s new drama: Play as the essence of what happened. Journal of Language and Literature Studies 2022 (30) (Oct.), 1196-1207. DOI: 10.29000/rumelide.1193093.

Steven Pinker: The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. 2014, Penguin.

Stephen King: On writing: A memoir of the craft. 2000, Hodder and Stoughton.