The train rumbled over the tracks and sunlight flickered in the window as I stared down at the book in my hands. The essay was full of run on sentences and confusing ideas that jumbled together. I checked the book’s title, Best American Essays of the Twentieth Century. I suddenly became unsure of the editor, Joyce Carol Oates’ sanity. The essay was awful.

Anything seemed more interesting to me, at that moment, than Gertrude Stein’s “What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them?” I forced my eyes down on the page.

I began to comprehend some of Stein’s arguments, I slowly let go of my prejudice against her writing style. She makes the point in her essay that all great artists use the material as he or she sees fit, and this is exactly how Stein was using her material. Her punctuation was unusually wrong, and her words were where she saw fit for them to be. Periods and commas and new paragraphs were not where they should have been, if consulting a handbook. She was using punctuation as an artistic element instead of the conventional hand-book formula.

“Genius!” I muttered under my breath.

However, this revelation didn’t make the piece any easier for me to read. Yet, my mind started churning. Stein was breaking rules I’d never seen broken on purpose before. I’d read plenty of my peers’ papers which made the mistakes by accident, but Gertrude Stein was trying to write like this. In painting and other artistic forms, the rules of how to use material are encouraged to be broken now, but miss a comma in your writing, and you’re doomed.

While society allows painters like Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns to break conventional rules- why can’t writers begin taking the same kind of risks? Risks with literary content have been taken, but what about risking form? What makes art good has been addressed over centuries. Now– what makes writing good?

Obviously rules can be broken to serve a purpose and to question the rules existence. Writing and painting are both arts, but before reading Stein’s piece I had never considered applying the same mindset on breaking rules to writing as I did for art.

Like breaking rules in painting, breaking rules in art takes some talent. It is commonly understood in most circles, not only artistic, that in order to break rules you must understand them fully. Picasso was able to depict the human form the way the rest of the world is able to see it, but that was not the point of his work. Nor was writing with correct commas and sentence structure the point of Stein’s piece, although she was capable of it.

Breaking the mold, and questioning master-pieces are was Stein’s objective. The words would still be difficult for me to patch together in my mind, but now I was able to view the whole piece in a different light. Stein’s essay was a brand new artistic movement to me.